Student Attendance Domain - Best Practices and Use Cases

Owned by Eric Jansson
Last updated: Aug 09, 2022
2 min read

Contents

All Attendance vs Negative Attendance Capture

The Ed-Fi Student Attendance domain model supports two styles for reporting attendance:

  1. All attendance events are captured: one attendance event is recorded for each student against each school day, section, program, or intervention. In this model, both "positive" ("In Attendance") and "negative" attendance events ("Excused Absence", "Excused Absence", "Tardy", etc.) are captured. 
  2. Negative attendance only. In this model, "positive" attendance is not captured, and only the exceptions to being in attendance are captured ("Excused Absence", "Excused Absence", "Tardy", etc.)

Both models are possible, but the RECOMMENDED pattern is to use negative attendance only for school and section based attendance UNLESS there is additional data captured as part of the positive attendance record.

There are two reasons to prefer the negative-only capture:

  • Sending all attendance events has the effect of exploding the volume of record exchange (generally negative attendance is <10% of all events)
  • The data on positive attendance can – by using standard calendar data exports – be inferred and is therefore redundant

Capturing both positive and negative attendance events is RECOMMENDED when there is additional data capture associated with the positive attendance record. For example, a school offering students both a "remote" and "on campus" option may choose to capture how attendance is verified for "remote" attendance, and therefore use codes such as "In attendance - completed assignment" or "In attendance - participated synchronously online", etc. In this case, the capture of positive attendance is needed to capture this additional data.

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