Does Being Placed With a "Familiar Classmate" Improve Student Attendance?

• In Event: 41.083 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 41.083-6 - Scalable Mechanisms to Improve K–12 Attendance

Abstract

Given the established importance of peer relationships in early years of schooling, it is poignant for policymakers to understand how classmates influence attendance. Considering classmates can both positively and negatively influence school engagement and thus student absenteeism, surprisingly no research has examined how having familiar classmates (i.e., classmates from the previous school year in a student’s current classroom) influences attendance. As much research has traced the patterns and implications of absenteeism to attendance in elementary grades, the important issue of having a familiar classmate, especially in elementary school classrooms where children share the same setting for the entire day, has been completely overlooked in policy discussions. Some research suggests that the stability of these peer relationships has important benefits to students, and thus there is an inherent need for administrators and policymakers to understand how this stability might influence attendance patterns for elementary students.

This study is the first to examine whether students who were placed with a familiar classmate had different absence patterns compared to students who had no familiar classmates. This study explored administrative data from a small, urban district’s elementary schools. The dataset contains individual level logs of daily absences for every student, student demographics, and teacher and classroom characteristics. Reporting absence records for 13 public elementary schools over three contiguous years, each year of data includes 206 classrooms of students with an average class size of 28 – totaling 292 classroom teachers over the three years. Overall, the analytic sample includes N = 8,209 student observations in grades one through five in 2012-14. The key predictor variable used in this study was a binary indicator for whether a student had a classmate from the previous school year in the present classroom.

The results show that having a classmate from a previous year was associated with a decrease in total unexcused absences. Additionally, the findings suggest that the odds of chronic absenteeism were lower in the presence of a familiar classmate. Looking at the differences in associations by student characteristics, the findings suggest that girls, English language learners, and students receiving free or reduced lunch tended to benefit most from having a familiar classmate – having fewer unexcused absences as well as lower odds for being chronically absent.

Throughout the early years of schooling, students experience numerous transitions in their educational environment. For example, transitions occur via grade promotion or retention, transfers between classes or schools, and splitting classrooms between teachers. As students constantly transition into new social and academic worlds, policymakers might consider implementing stabilizing factors that contribute to school attendance. We believe that creating classrooms where students have familiar classmates may serve as one policy lever. An existing base of familiarity may provide students an easy mechanism through which to make friends during these transitions. Thus by providing this protective factor, students may a better chance of engaging both academically and socially in their classrooms, avoiding future negative implications caused by missing school.

Author

• Jacob Kirksey, University of California - Santa Barbara