Is Showing Up Half the Work? The Relationship among Student Attendance, Engagement and Test Scores

AbstractDifferentiating engagement from attendance is important for understanding predictors of academic achievement. In 613 students, engagement was psychometrically operationalized, whereas attendance was defined as physical presence in the classroom. Achievement was operationalized as exam scores. Significant correlations emerged between engagement and achievement (.26–.43), and attendance and achievement (.25–.40). Correlation coefficients increased in the tails of the distribution (.35–.62). Engagement explained an additional 6–10% of the variance in achievement (22–38%) compared to attendance (16–28%). Students who never attended class scored in the failing range on the final exam. In contrast, students who attended every class scored 20% higher on the same exam. Students with perfect attendance and perfect engagement scores outperformed students with perfect attendance but less than perfect engagement on exams. Perfect engagement provided a relative advantage of 0.33–0.44 Cohen’s d units above and beyond perfect attendance. Since attendance alone fails to capture essential aspects of student behavior that predict academic achievement, developing instruments that measure the quality of engagement has the potential to capture additional variance in student participation. Making the difference between attendance and engagement explicit to students may have pedagogical value.Keywords: Attendanceeffortgrade inflationmotivationstudent engagement Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).