Class attendance, peer similarity, and academic performance in a large field study

Identifying the factors that determine academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Existing research indicates that class attendance is a useful predictor of subsequent course achievements. The majority of the literature is, however, based on surveys and self-reports, methods which have well-known systematic biases that lead to limitations on conclusions and generalizability as well as being costly to implement. Here we propose a novel method for measuring class attendance that overcomes these limitations by using location and bluetooth data collected from smartphone sensors. Based on measured attendance data of nearly 1,000 undergraduate students, we demonstrate that early and consistent class attendance strongly correlates with academic performance. In addition, our novel dataset allows us to determine that attendance among social peers was substantially correlated ($>$0.5), suggesting either an important peer effect or homophily with respect to attendance

Correlation between self and peer corrected attendance.

<p>Shown are the attendance relative to the average calculated at the level of classes. Each dot represents a student’s own and their peers’ median deviation from the average attendance with respect to a course, that is, their attendance deviation averaged over all classes of a course.</p

Class attendance and performance.

<p>a) Illustration of the five groups based on class attendance. Bars indicate groups of equal size, width corresponds to the span of attendance percentage in the specific group and height shows the mean term GPA. b) Grade distribution inside each attendance quintile. Each group includes at least 373 students.</p

Class attendance conditional on grade obtained.

<p>Box plots show median values (solid horizontal line), mean values (red dots), lower and upper quartiles (box outline) and lower and upper fences (quartiles ± IQR, whiskers). Error bars mark standard deviation of the mean. Bar chart above the boxplot shows the number of observations in each grade group.</p

Change in class attendance over a single semester.

<p>a) Trends of attendance observed in the three performer groups: low (red circles), moderate (green diamonds) and high performers (blue pentagons), according to the Danish grading system. Inset shows the distribution of slopes measured for each pairs of data point in the trends. b) Mean attendance measured among the contacts of the students based on exchanged text messages.</p

Correlation between own and peers’ attendance.

<p>Scatter plot that shows student’s own attendance vs mean attendance among contacts (inferred from text messages) at the course level. Color represents the relative density of data points.</p

Estimation of class locations at the Technical University of Denmark campus.

<p>a) Location of the students who were assigned to a specific class (colored small circles), with the estimated location (moderate size red circle) and range of the class (large light red circle) in a particular day. b) Estimated class locations (red circles) of the same course throughout the semester. (Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">www.openstreetmap.org</a> under CC BY-SA 2.0).</p