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Attendance and Student Performance in Undergraduate Chemistry Courses

2012; Project Innovation Austin; Volume: 133; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0013-1172

Ganna Lyubartseva, U.P. Mallik,

Higher Education Research Studies

Introduction Numerous studies suggest that attendance may be one of the factors which influence performance of students enrolled in science courses. Majority of reports suggest the positive correlation between student attendance and grades (Soto & Anand, 2009; Moore & Jensen, 2008; Moore, 2003; Thomas & Higbee, 2003; Hammed & Kelland, 1994). The strength of the relationship is disputable, however finding of these studies are fairly consistent among various science disciplines and course levels. Thomas and Higbee (2003) found the correlation between attendance and grades in mathematics courses. Hammed and Kelland (1994) analyzed student performance in Human Physiology and found similar results. In their recent study Soto and Anand (2009) focused on undergraduate Cell Biology core course. They showed that among different factors such as completion of chemistry requirements, passing the laboratory component of the course, homework and attendance, the latter was the most important factor associated with passing the course. Moore and Jensen (2008) reported that reducing the number of allowable absences from three labs to two labs per semester improved course grades in an introductory biology course. Although there have been many studies of students' performance in introductory science courses, there have been virtually no studies which analyze and compare students' performance from different types of higher education institutions, i.e. university vs. community college. Our study was aimed to identify if attendance influences students' success in chemistry lecture courses regardless of the type of school and course specifics such as course level, size of the class and instructor. Method In this work we tried to understand if attendance may be one of the factors which contribute to overall student's success in the course. To address this hypothesis we analyzed course performance of students with high attendance of 95% and above. To get a better picture we looked at data from high and low level courses taught at two different institutions: the regional school, Southern Arkansas University, and community college, Cochise College in Arizona. All these data were collected between Fall 2009 and Summer 2011 semesters. Results We analyzed advanced courses at the Southern Arkansas University (class size is 48 students maximum): three semesters of Organic Chemistry I and one semester of Biochemistry I; and lower level courses at Cochise College (class size is 24 students maximum): two semesters of Fundamental Chemistry, two semesters of General Chemistry I, and two semesters of General Chemistry II. We were interested in performance of students whose attendance was 95% or higher, so we looked at how many of them achieved B or above final grade (high performance) and students who received grade C or below (low performance), in percentage. It turned out that regardless of a course level or type of institution, majority of students who attended 95% or more classes throughout the semester showed successful performance: on average 72.9% got B and above final grades vs. 27.1% received C and below grades in Southern Arkansas University (Table 1); average 74.5% got B and above compared to 25.5% C and below grades in Cochise College (Table 2). Discussion Our results clearly suggest that there is a strong correlation between attendance and student's performance. We believe that attendance is an important indicator of student engagement in traditional face-to face lecture courses. Not only students who miss the class cannot participate in classroom activities, such as group discussion and solving problems, but also attendance shows students' course-related efforts and motivation which are related to overall performance in the course (Lyubartseva, 2011). Unfortunately, absenteeism in introductory courses often exceeds 25% even in classes taught by award-winning instructors (Friedman et. …