Abstract
The link between absenteeism and students’ academic performance at university is perpetually a hot topic for teaching academics. Most studies suggest the effect is negative, although the strength of this effect is in dispute. The issue is complicated further when researchers draw their inferences from different angles, such as the removal of a mandatory attendance policy or the implementation of a module‐specific attendance policy. Although previous studies have suggested the effect on exam performance of removing a mandatory attendance policy is weak, this study investigates the effect of implementing a module‐specific attendance policy and finds a strong effect on exam performance. We also identify that student‐specific factors are important, including revision strategies and peer‐group effects and that not taking account of these factors will result in biased estimates of the effect of an attendance policy on exam performance. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the effect of absenteeism on exam performance is non‐linear and further research is needed to identify when attendance policy is a justifiable tool.
Highlights
It is generally accepted by tutors that there is a positive relationship between attendance and student achievement; this view is supported by Grendron and Pieper (2005) who demonstrate that a strong negative link between absenteeism and assessment performance is usually reported in the literature the statistical significance of this link is not consistently found
We emphasise that Marburger’s findings are far from conclusive because of concerns over the credibility of removing a university-wide mandatory attendance policy for a single seminar group and because the potential impacts of peer group effects and revision strategies are not explicitly taken into account, our main conclusion is that the relationship between attendance and exam performance may not be uniform across different rates of attendance; the effect of attendance criteria on exam performance are likely to be much stronger at low levels of attendance and are likely to reduce as attendance rate rise
We start by isolating the attendance effect and regress exam mark on attendance; these results are presented in column 1 of Table 6
Summary
It is generally accepted by tutors that there is a positive relationship between attendance and student achievement; this view is supported by Grendron and Pieper (2005) who demonstrate that a strong negative link between absenteeism and assessment performance is usually reported in the literature the statistical significance of this link is not consistently found. For sceptics of mandatory policies on attendance (such as Petress, 1996) this lack of significance is enough to challenge the idea that such policies offer universities the ‘golden bullet’ that will improve both their overall marks and their progression rates Against this background Marburger (2006) presents an empirical study of the impact of relaxing an American university’s mandatory attendance policy for a 1st year undergraduate module in order to identify whether the lack of policy influenced attendance and whether attendance affected the student’s grade on the module. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the methodology and findings of Marburger (2006) and to identify whether the effect of implementing an attendance policy had a similar effect as removing an attendance policy If it does not there might be evidence that the perspectives of Grendron and Pieper (2005), Petress (1996) and Marburger (2006) could all be acceptable in different circumstances. These conventions prevent us from replicating Marburger’s (2006) policy/no-policy experiment; instead we are studying the variation in student behaviour within one cohort of students where attendance forms part of the student’s final marks
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