Student Attendance Domain - Best Practices and Use Cases

Contents

Definition and Key Concepts

Research shows that student attendance is an important factor in student achievement.  Excessive or chronic student absences negatively impact student achievement because of the lost opportunities to learn.  High quality and timely attendance data is needed to:

• Support research on the near term and long term impacts of chronic absenteeism.
• Analyze student attendance data to correlate with student demographic groups, academic performance, grade levels, retention patterns, school completion, and graduation.
• Provide early warning to identify specific students who are chronically absent or at risk of being chronically absent.
• Track student’s absences due to disciplinary detention, suspension, or expulsion.
• Inform student and family supports and interventions to improve a student’s attendance.

In addition, student attendance may be used to determine state school funding or program grant funding, making attendance data high-stakes.

Attendance is defined as when a student is identified, or marked, as being Absent, Present, or Tardy, in whole or in part. Attendance may be collected at different levels of granularity:

• School attendance, indicating whether the student has attended the school for the entire school day, a portion of the school day, or has been absent for the entire school day. School attendance is marked for each instructional day in the school year.
• Section attendance – used in secondary education settings which organizes the instruction into sections – indicating full or partial attendance or absence for each period the section meets. Section attendance is marked for each class period the section meets.
• Program attendance, tracking a student’s participation in a program and/or a student receiving services as part of a program. Program attendance is marked for each scheduled time the student is to participate in the program or receive program services.
• Intervention attendance, marking the student as present or absent for scheduled intervention activities. Intervention attendance is marked for each scheduled time the student is receiving intervention instruction or services.

 The Ed-Fi attendance domain supports all of these options.

There are generally two popular practices for taking attendance:

• Negative attendance: the practice of taking student attendance when a teacher marks a student is absent. Marking negative attendance most often involves a manual process whereby a teacher or other staff marks a student absent into an automated system, most likely the student information system (SIS). 
• Positive attendance: the practice of taking student attendance when students identify themselves as being present. Positive attendance is often supported by hardware or other mechanisms that allow the student to “check in” without regular manual teacher actions.

Partial attendance – where a student arrives late (tardy) or leaves early – may be marked as part of either positive or negative attendance practices.

Attendance in Ed-Fi is event-based.  An attendance event represents the recording in the Ed-Fi API/ODS whether a student is Present or Absent (or Tardy) for the school day, for a scheduled section, program, or intervention activity.  This is typically written by the SIS.

Note that the negative or positive attendance practices in the school and classroom are independent of whether just Absent attendance events, Present attendance events, or both are written into the Ed-Fi API/ODS.  For example, the process may only mark absences, but the SIS may write both absent and present, assuming any student that is not absent is present.  The same may be true for positive attendance.

An attendance event has the following attributes and associations:

• Reference to the Student
• Reference to the appropriate School, Section, Program or Intervention
• Date of the attendance event
• The category of the attendance event, indicating whether the event is recording “present,” “absent” or “partial attendance” (arrives late (tardy) or leaves early). It may also include other key categorizations such as
  • If present, the modality of learning (e.g., classroom, remote, blended)
  • If absent, whether the absence is excused or not excused.
  • If absent or tardy, the associated category for the reason

Optionally, an attendance event may also include:

• The detailed reason for the absent, present, or partial attendance, as applicable
• The education environment (setting) where the (present) student receives instruction or services
• The arrival and departure times of the student
• The duration of the attendance event

It is important to remember that statutes and practices differ from state to state and across localities concerning recognized reasons for student absences.

Attendance Use Cases

The attendance domain addresses all use cases related to school, section, program, and intervention attendance, as shown in the following table. Each type of attendance event has its own specific attendance event entity.

School Day vs Section Period Attendance 

There are two common ways to mark attendance, school-based and section-based. School-based models are common in lower grades where a student's attendance is assessed against the entire school day. Section-based models are common in upper grades where a student's attendance is assessed against specific section periods. When multiple periods exist for a section on the same day, the one or more class periods may be referenced.

Generally, a section-based model "rolls up" to a school-based model as well. In other words, the student was "Tardy" for "Period 1" and is also "Tardy" for the overall school day.

In using Ed-Fi to represent attendance, systems SHOULD provide overall school-based attendance. This ensures that systems that are looking for simplified views on a student's overall school attendance patterns have a simplified way of understanding how school day attendance was assessed, without having to replicate the business logic of converting from section-based attendance to school day attendance, which involves business logic likely opaque to downstream systems.

However, where section based attendance is captured, compliant systems SHOULD also provide section-based attendance events.

Sample Use Cases