A Meta-Analytic Review of Interventions Targeting the Attendance Crisis

• In Event: Unpacking The Role of Student Health Challenges in Chronic Absenteeism

Abstract

Recently, public schools have faced an attendance crisis, with 72% of principals indicating that chronic absenteeism had increased considerably since the years before the pandemic (NCES, 2022). Many policies, programs, and practices to address absenteeism have emerged, although they have been researched in isolation from each other. For policymakers deciding which intervention to implement, they need information not only about whether a given intervention “works,” but also whether the intervention will work for the specific context under which their schools operate. The purpose of our study is to bridge the research-to-practice gap by conducting a practitioner-oriented systematic review that estimates the potential effect sizes of various interventions and identifies the features of interventions that are associated with larger effect sizes.

 

Data Source

We conducted a review for studies that fit the following criteria:

• Published in English from 2016 (which was the year in which the Every Student Succeeds Act was implemented) through the present.


• Examined absenteeism mitigation interventions delivered in the U.S. to students in preschool through the twelfth grade.


• Analyzed student attendance outcomes obtained through administrative records. Attendance outcomes needed to be reported as attendance rate, days attended/absent, truancy rate, or chronic absence.


• Employed a randomized or quasi-experimental design, with results reported as regression coefficients and associated standard errors.

 

A search of six social studies databases yielded 94 studies that fits our year criterion thus far. Of these, 60% were eliminated, mostly because they failed the outcome criterion or because they were not intervention studies. We have identified 38 eligible studies for inclusion, of which were 17% conducted at the preschool level, 21% at the elementary level, another 21% at the middle grades, 34% at the high school level, and 7% at multiple grade levels.

 

Analytic approach

We found a summary effect size by calculating the weighted average of the observed effect sizes, where the weight is the inverse of the squared standard error (Kim, 2011; Nieminen et al., 2013). Effects were estimated using a random-effects model, which assumes that variation in the observed effect sizes stems from both sampling error and random variance.  We supplemented this quantitative analysis with a narrative review of the interventions.

 

Results

Absenteeism interventions were not related to attendance rate (β = 0.006, SE = 0.020), but significantly related to a reduction in chronic absenteeism (β = -0.034, SE = 0.006, p < 0.01). Few studies examined whether these relationships were sustained beyond the year in which the intervention was provided. Of those that did, the majority were conducted at the preschool level, and reported null associations beyond kindergarten. Surprisingly, programs that were “high touch” interventions (e.g., those that required sustained relationships between mentors and families and schools) were as effective as “lower touch” interventions (e.g., texting programs). However, given that “high touch” interventions were conducted primarily at the high school grades, where attendance problems tend to be more severe than at the lower grades, we cannot rule out the possibility that differences in grade levels were driving the results.

Author

• Vi-Nhuan Le, NORC at the University of Chicago
  Presenting Author