Generation - StudentAttendance Interchange Data

This section outlines the StudentAttendance Interchange generation rules.

Input & Precursors

Standard configuration file, which includes a SchoolProfile with a SchoolAttendanceProfile configuration entity.

Entities & Elements

Interchange-StudentAttendance.xsd contains the following entities:

StudentSectionAttendanceEvent

Path

Element

Rules

Notes

StudentSectionAttendance

StudentReference

Populated with reference to previously generated student

SectionReference

Populated with reference to previously generated section

AttendanceEvent

There are several pre-defined attendance patterns that can be randomly applied to a given student. Generally the special attendance profiles are only applied to students with low performance profiles – 50th percentile or below. Absent a special attendance profile, a standard attendance profile is applied based on the student's performance index. Special profiles include:

Regularly absent on a specific day of the week
Regularly absent for the first period(s) of the day
Regularly absent for the last period(s) of the day
Regularly tardy for the first period of the day
Frequently tardy to random periods throughout the day

Depending on the profile chosen for the student, absence/tardy events are generated according to a Poisson process using absence/tardy rates defined in the attendance profile. Generally the attendance and tardy rates should trend to the average rates configured via XML, though outliers with particularly bad attendance and the random process itself mean that the overall attendance rate won't exactly match the configured average values.

Unless otherwise specified in the Config XML file, the default attendance rate is 93% (per NCES); the default tardy rate is 1%.