Every School Day Counts: The Forum Guide to Collecting and Using Attendance Data

摘要

The National Forum on Education Statistics (the Forum) is pleased to present Every School Day Counts: The Forum Guide to Collecting and Using Attendance Data. One goal of the Forum is to improve the quality of education data gathered for use by policymakers and program decisionmakers. An approach to furthering this goal has been to pool the collective experiences of Forum members to produce best practice guides in areas of high interest to those who collect, maintain, and use data about elementary and secondary education. Standardizing the way data systems record student attendance that is, developing a taxonomy of common attendance codes--is one of those high interest areas. Every school day counts in a student's life. While research substantiates the importance of teacher effectiveness on student academic success, even the best teacher cannot be effective unless students are present in class. Regular attendance is essential to providing students with opportunities to learn, and these opportunities are limited when students do not attend school. Moreover, access to accurate, timely data about whether individual students and groups of students regularly attend school is critical to making instructional and programmatic choices targeting student attendance behaviors. High-quality data enable educators to identify which students are absent; as well as the frequency of, and reasons for, their absences. By arming schools with actionable information, these data can guide the design of interventions intended to improve attendance and student achievement.