TL;DR: Chronic Absenteeism is a problem for many communities, without a clear solution. One important strategy requires the collection of accurate data. This too is a challenge for multi-classroom schools and constant monitoring situations.
Thank you for your attention. This is the third blog post in the series documenting the design and construction of a prototype ‘Attendance Automator.’ A lot has happened since my last post, but hardly any of it to do with this project, and so the delay. Many apologies to those eager to keep up with the study.
While waiting for the project kits to arrive so long ago, I had it in mind to conduct some background research on the problems that the Attendance Automator hopes to address. Here is a sampling of what I have found.
While the impetus for this project began in consideration of an anecdote wherein a teacher was unable to successfully monitor a classroom of 36 students, 2 of which managed to escape her watch long enough to break into the between-classrooms laboratory ready-room and participate in illegal substances before the odor got them caught, the problem of attendance is a much larger issue than a single classroom.
In my neighborhood school district, the topic has become enough of an issue as to warrant the creation of a high school Truancy Counselor position, whose job description details the tasks of reviewing attendance registers at the beginning of the day and following the lunch break and taking up investigation of absentee students. This counselor is trained to make home visits to determine the whereabouts of chronically absent students.
The website AttendanceWorks.org provides a thorough resource for the community wishing to decrease the number of truancy events in their area. They summarize the present difficulties with attendance recording as such, “In many cases, these attendance patterns go unnoticed because schools are counting how many students show up everyday rather than looking at how many miss so much school that they are falling behind. While much of [The United States’] attendance policy focuses on finding and punishing students who miss school without an excuse, not enough attention is paid to preventing excused absences due to health concerns or other family and community issues,” (1).
In order to improve attendance, Attendance Works suggests numerous strategies, which include, Actionable Data, “Taking the appropriate action requires having accurate, easily accessible, up-to-date data that shows which and how many students are chronically absent — ideally broken down by school and grade. Such student-level data should be available and reviewed monthly while data on overall levels of chronic absenteeism… might be examined less frequently, possibly at the end of each quarter or semester.” (2) They further extend themselves to provide free spreadsheet templates for schools to analyze the collected data (3).
While Attendance Works has begun to tackle the problem from the macro level, seeking to establish strategies on the school, district, and community levels on the day to day and longer timeframes, there remains the matter of taking attendance and managing classroom behaviors that this project hopes to address.
As mentioned in my problem statement, attendance at higher grade levels can easily become a burden and time constraint for inexperienced or unfamiliar teachers, technology-starved budgets, and over-populated classrooms.
Many ideas for automating attendance center on self-reporting. For instance, many classrooms operate on a variation of a clock-punch system as seen here:
http://www.pre-kpages.com/images/name-chart2.jpg (4)
The general notion of this arrangement is that students will find their name from a collection and place their tag into it’s pocket. The pocket then corresponds to the classroom seating chart. This simple method has even been rendered in high-tech SMART board environments (5) and turned into an effective mobile phone check (6).
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/9e/92/e8/9e92e8013c7fc1cad14f0870d96b491d.jpg
My main concern with the self-reporting method is the accuracy of the process. Any student could easily misuse the board on accident, placing the wrong name into the larger holder or placing their name in the wrong seat. Students could also forget to complete the register (Who hasn’t forgotten to sign in before?). Some students will certainly attempt to cheat the system for a friend’s benefit by placing name cards besides their own. This process is also time consuming. The students must locate their cards, and their place, and take turns in doing so. Consider the last time you worked in an office with a shared timecard, it was certainly secured with a password, but the delays closer and closer to start time probably left your true arrival time misrepresented in the system. The amount of time needed to execute on this setup is much too long for a school with 6-8 classroom periods a day. Once the card-sort system is completed for the day’s lesson, the board itself has to be recorded. Perhaps the teacher marks this into a book, which must then be transcribed into a computer, another process that could lead to error. Perhaps the teacher takes a snapshot of the board each day. The teacher too is not above forgetfulness and what of a student that arrives late, after the board has been photographed?
Each of these considerations are readily applied to the situation I have usually found myself in while substitute teaching: Taking roll call. Calling out each student’s name is tedious and time-consuming. While it sometimes aids in learning the names of one’s charges, the students already know each other and rarely need another moment of boredom in which to struggle to remain quiet, especially under the already untested authority of a sub.
Another important recommendation from educators-at-large is to begin the class with an assigned activity. While an effective, efficient, and clever use of students’ time, the process is prone to the same transcription errors and accidents as the above (How often have you as a student forgotten to write your name on a turned-in document or forgotten to turn it in altogether? And how much time lapses between the start of class and the teacher’s first opportunity to record these lessons in the attendance system?) (8).
Lastly, there appears to be no effective or share-worthy method for monitoring students’ seated status on a consistent basis, the problem in my anecdote, which I am trying to solve. This may be because most teachers rely on their ability to scan the room, but this is easily thwarted by those students devious enough. The reason I am unable to uncover additional solutions may be due insufficient resources or research. For this, I do kindly request any feedback, links, or suggestions in the comments section below.
By addressing these concerns with software and robotics, the concerned public is able to remedy these issues without requiring more effort from already thin-worn teachers, administration, sparse budgets unable to afford additional personnel or training, and to meet a universal demand.
Please stay tuned for my next post, which will outline my proposed solution using the RaspberryPi!
Thank you for reading!
—Spencer
Previously:
Blog Entry 1: Hello! http://www.element14.com/community/groups/stemacademy/blog/2015/05/11/teachers-pet-students-robotics-challenge-attendance-automator-blog-entry-1-hello
Blog Entry 2: Design Constraints http://www.element14.com/community/groups/stemacademy/blog/2015/06/09/teachers-pet-students-robotics-challenge-attendance-automator-blog-entry-2-design-constraints
Tags: "teachers_pet" "attendance_automator" "raspberry_pi" "adafruit"
Notes:
(1) Attendance Works. “New Report: Mapping the Early Attendance Gap.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://www.attendanceworks.org/new-report-mapping-the-early-attendance-gap/
(2) Attendance Works. “Actionable Data.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://www.attendanceworks.org/what-works/actionable-data/
(3) Attendance Works. “For Calculating Chronic Absence.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://www.attendanceworks.org/tools/tools-for-calculating-chronic-absence/
(4) A to Z Teacher Stuff. “Taking Attendance Ideas.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=113369
(5) SMART Technologies ULC. “SMART Classroom Attendance Ideas.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://exchange.smarttech.com/details.html?id=269bbdaa-97c6-4509-bf19-2d5fb02120a9
(6) Perhaps you’ve seen this going around. Original source unknown, although it might have been determined were it not for Pinterest’s being such an awful website. Regardless, this is generally a bad idea for multiple reasons: a) It draws unwanted attention to students who do not own a mobile device b) Separates the owner from an expensive article of emergency equipment and constitutes 'false imprisonment' by removing one's access to communication c) Discourages students from learning self-constraint and focus within a classroom environment, and d) Introduces a student already wishing to avoid class yet another reason to play hooky. These, amongst others, are reasons not to take attendance using students’ personal mobile technology either (e.g., 7).
(7) 1000 Projects. "Mobile Phone Based Attendance System." Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://1000projects.org/mobile-phone-based-attendance-system.html
(8) The Clutter-Free Classroom. “Taking Attendance: Classroom Management Series.” Retrieved September 7, 2015 from http://clutterfreeclassroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/taking-attendance-classroom-management.html