Date of Award
2003
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Programs for Higher Education
Advisor
Charles Amuso
Committee Member
Eugene Costa
Committee Member
Barbara Packer
Keywords
9th-grade students, alpha-photographic class attendance list, attendance patterns, attendance rate, class attendance, class-cutting, communication process, cooperative system, electronic card-scanning identification system, intervention, parent-teacher cooperation, parents, progress slips, school attendance, secondary school students, secondary school teachers, student behavior, student surveys, teachers, technology advancement
Abstract
This applied dissertation was designed to examine a cooperative system to resolve the class-cutting problem of 9th–grade students in an urban high school. The process included teachers, parents, and students. All attendance records at this school were handwritten and manually generated on forms. The process was slow, immediate feedback was difficult, and the system was cumbersome to manage. Teachers did not have a remedy for the situation, parents displayed indifference, and students denied their perpetration.
Separate surveys were developed and administered to teachers, parents, and students before and after the intervention to determine their various viewpoints on school attendance and related topics. A student who cut class was given a progress slip that required comments from the teacher and a signature from the parent(s). This slip began the communication process among the concerned parties and made the students aware of their class-cutting behavior.
Presurvey data revealed that all of the students who had cut classes were in denial about their attendance infractions. After the intervention, responses on the student post surveys indicated that 50% of them indicated that they needed help to stop their class-cutting habits. The 9th-grade students’ attendance improved as a result of this intervention; the average number of 9th graders who cut classes each period dropped to 6 from the preintervention average of 28.
The initial plan had been to identify students who cut class within 24 hours using an electronic card-scanning identification system and an alpha-photographic class attendance list; however, it was not possible to implement these components during the study. It is unknown what effect these technological components would have had on the attendance rate.