A Review of Teaching Research as a Tool for Improving School Attendance

Then in December, Stanford researchers with the National Student Support Accelerator released an academic paper with more details about the announced increase to Washington. Lee and his research team analyzed the tutoring schedules of more than 4,000 students and calculated that a student was 7 percent more likely to be absent from school on a day when tutoring was on the schedule, compared to a day when tutoring was not in school. system. The researchers think that maybe the students feel like they are learning in these sessions, or they enjoy the personal attention, and they look forward to it.

Teaching schedules ranged from once a week to daily. A student scheduled to receive instruction three times a week, the recommended minimum for effective retention instruction, will attend a total of 1.3 additional days of school, on average, during the 180-day school year.

“That sounds short, just a day or so,” Lee agreed. But he said “it’s encouraging to move the needle at all,” with this group of economically disadvantaged students. More than 80 percent of the students were black. The rest were Spanish.

What struck me was the high absenteeism rate among the thousands of students selected to teach: 17 percent. In other words, these students had missed more than 30 days, not including weekends. A large proportion of them – one in six – were considered “severely absent,” missing more than 30 percent of the school year. That’s about 60 school days. “They fail at school at an alarming rate,” said Lee.

No wonder these children and youth are so far behind. And it’s no wonder that Washington leaders wanted teachers for these children, who were at risk of falling behind and eventually dropping out.

I contacted Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, an organization that works with schools to increase attendance, to ask how important one extra day of school can be to students who are chronically absent. He said working with children who missed 30 days is important. “I am concerned that this small change (1.3), while promising, may not be enough to make a difference,” he said in an email.

Chang consulted with his research team and found a bright spot: small gains can be aggregated across the school. For one student, 1.3 days is less, Chang explained. But for 100 students, that’s 130 more days. “It would be a move toward more stability in classrooms,” Chang said.

Estimates hide big differences. Attendance for other students increased significantly. Middle school students are the most likely to attend school on an instructional day, which translates to 2.1 extra days of school for a student who was scheduled three times a week. High school students were less likely to be active in school. Their attendance was not significantly different between instructional and non-instructional days. Instruction scheduled during the school day was a greater incentive for attendance than instruction scheduled after school. Small teacher-to-student ratios of 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 were more effective in reducing absenteeism than larger teaching groups of three or four students. (All teaching was in person, not online.)

Much of what schools are trying to actually do is rarely studied and analyzed carefully. Research like this helps school leaders think about what works and what doesn’t. Washington deserves credit for trying to teach, which has shown strong benefits in previous centuries, albeit small studies, and opening doors for researchers to study its large output.

It didn’t work as well as expected for various reasons. Some teaching was not scheduled as often as research has suggested, or during the school day when attendance is highest. But an important lesson from this analysis is that some students may not engage in school to benefit from even well-designed instructional programs. It is useless to hire teachers who have not come.

The Stanford study makes the argument that self-directed learning helps re-engage children in school and that any improvement in school attendance is important. But I doubt the economic value if the profit is so small.

I do not envy the school leaders. They are faced with masses of abandoned students and we have no good solutions for them.