Monitoring attendance and its impact on engineering students

This paper presents the findings of a two-year study with foundation (level 3) student attendance and performance. Learning analytics has become a popular term within higher education and there are several dashboard applications available for institutions to invest in. There has also been an increase in attendance monitoring activity across the higher education sector. Some dashboards merge attendance monitoring with other learning analytics data to provide reports and in some cases encourage better engagement by students. The drivers and outcomes linked to such monitoring may be different in different institutions. At Portsmouth, the School of Engineering developed a bespoke in-house attendance monitoring system and has been carrying out research looking at the benefits of such a system for staff and students. Quantitative data was used from the attendance monitoring system along with course specific data collected in previous years before the introduction of the system to evaluate progression. This paper highlights some challenges faced during the implementation of the attendance monitoring trial system with the School of Engineering and presents some observations on the effects that attendance monitoring had on the progression and achievement of students.