Student Attendance Domain - Overview

Key Entities

This domain contains:

• An AttendanceEvent entities which connect Student entities to Section, School, and Program entities. The AttendanceEvent can model attendance, tardies, and absences for a particular class or school day.
• A SectionAttendanceTakenEvent, which models information about the taking of attendance, primarily the date on which attendance was captured.

Key Concepts

The key concepts include the following:

• Attendance in the Ed-Fi data model can be affirmative, meaning that both attendance and absence are recorded, or can be “exception only” reporting, providing attendance events only for absences and tardies.
• Attendance in the Ed-Fi data model is event-based, so every instance of being absent or tardy is recorded and tied to a specific date. There is no built-in aggregate value, as Ed-Fi generally avoids aggregations where business rules start to apply.
• The SectionAttendanceEventTaken entity is strictly for recording that attendance was taken on a specific day for a specific section (optionally) by a specific staff member. It doesn’t affect individual student attendance values within the Ed-Fi data model, but can be useful when analyzing trends in attendance over the course of a year.
• Attendance can be taken for a program, a section (such as a class period), or overall for a day by association with a Session entity.