Low attendance is linked with lower academic skills, grades, and high school graduation, and high attendance with higher ones¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2024 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Attendance from pre-K through high school is linked with academic skills, grades, and graduation likelihood. → UChicago Consortium on School Research 2024

Evidence¶

UChicago Consortium on School Research 2024¶

UChicago Consortium on School Research. (2024). Family playbook: How can we understand students' progress in school? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. https://consortium.uchicago.edu/events-and-resources

q2 · i? · design · r1

The playbook summarizes prior research (citing Attendance Works' compilation of key studies) on attendance-outcome links, stating low versus high attendance are linked with lower versus higher skills, grades, and graduation. Effect sizes are not printed.

"Low attendance is linked with lower academic skills, grades, and high school graduation. High attendance is linked with higher academic skills, grades, and high school graduation."

Studies bearing on this claim¶

Do learners who miss more school days learn less, earn lower grades and graduate less often? This table gathers the studies behind this claim and the 17 narrower claims that bear on it: 13 distinct studies (10 associational, 2 review, 1 design), q2–q3, 1 of 13 with an effect size coded. One row per study, codes as each entry records them; no effect is averaged and no verdict is drawn. Built by scripts/synthesize_claim.py from eval/synthesis/; a row that looks wrong is fixed on the claim it comes from.

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Time and Continuity — predictor: learners who differ on it differ in outcomes

Related Claims¶

• Missing five days of school in the first semester of ninth grade decreases the likelihood of eventually graduating high school by 25 percentage points — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Attendance Support students maintained a 3.0 GPA despite low attendance but graduated high school at 71 percent, below the district average, and fewer than half attended college — related
• Most CPS charter high schools enrolled students with eighth-grade test scores similar to or lower than their neighborhood feeder pools but with higher eighth-grade attendance — related
• Ninth-grade GPA strongly predicts on-time high school graduation, with an especially large gap between F and D students — related
• Risk thresholds on GPA and attendance differ for active English Learners: above 95% attendance or above 2.0 GPA predicted ~90% graduation for active ELs, while former and never ELs reached similar likelihood at 90% attendance — related
• Absences remained as strongly related to test scores and GPAs in post-pandemic years as pre-pandemic years — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Unexcused absences quadruple from eighth to ninth grade, explaining most of the drop in grades and pass rates across all student groups — related
• Persistently high chronic absenteeism rates are associated with slower academic recovery in math and reading after COVID-era disruptions — related
• Elementary students with 90%+ attendance and GPA 3.0+ in grades 3-8 were more likely to graduate high school with a 3.0+ GPA than peers in other EOT categories — related
• Students with the same absence rates had higher GPAs (and in grades 7-8, higher test scores) in post-pandemic years than pre-pandemic years — related
• Chronically absent preschoolers are much more likely to stay chronically absent, and each successive year of chronic absenteeism compounds risk of low second-grade reading — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Descriptively, prior-year chronically absent students achieved over half a standard deviation below their peers at the start of the following year — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Prior-year absence effects on starting achievement are much smaller in reading than mathematics and non-significant in most grade levels — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Good attendance is more strongly related to academic gains for students who enter preschool with lower incoming skills than for those entering with higher skills — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Each single prior-year absence is associated with a .010 to .016 SD decrease in fall mathematics starting achievement the following year — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Ninth grade truancy rates do not differ much by gender, undercutting the hypothesis that gang activity primarily drives absenteeism — related
• Peer victimization is associated with more school absences and lower grades and achievement among school-aged students — a narrower finding that bears on this claim