The Grade-level and Cumulative Outcomes of Absenteeism During Elementary School

• In Event: Unpacking School Absenteeism across the PreKindergarten and Elementary School Years

Abstract

It is clear that students who are more frequently absent from school are at greater risk for school difficulty (Gottfried & Hutt, 2019). Such evidence has motivated policymakers and practitioners to use student absenteeism as one of the key indicators of school performance. Nonetheless, the literature that has studied issues related to absenteeism and student outcomes has generally focused on end-of-year performance or on how absences link to students’ achievement. In doing so, studies have overlooked non-testing outcomes as well as the possible cumulative outcomes of school absences and variation across grade-levels and for subgroups of children.

To fill in these gaps in knowledge, we rely on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011), which is a nationally representative sample of 14,370 students from across the U.S. who were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. We use these data to examine the cumulative and grade-specific outcomes of absenteeism for students’ achievement, executive function, and socio-emotional development across the elementary school years, which represents a critical juncture because (a) absenteeism is at its peak in the first few years of children’s educational careers and (b) these are habits that become established in the earliest years and remain stable from there forth. We also consider whether the outcomes of absenteeism are larger for different groups of children cited as key groups in attendance research.

To address these questions, we estimate a series of path models in Mplus. Models included robust standard errors to safeguard against violations of normality and missing data were accounted for with full information maximum likelihood estimation. All models were weighted to be nationally representative and error term were clustered at the school level. To minimize the possibility of spurious associations, we controlled for a large number of covariates that were informed by the extant absenteeism literature. Indicators capture children’s characteristics and educational experiences, household characteristics, school-going practices and routines (see Table 1 for a full list), and lagged dependent variables.

As can be seen in the top panel of Table 1, students who were more frequently absent in any year of elementary school demonstrated lower academic, executive function, and socio-emotional outcomes. Although there was little variation in the magnitude of associations across grade levels, there was evidence of cumulative associations. Specifically, students who were consistently absent throughout elementary school tended to have lower outcomes across developmental domains in the long-term (see bottom panel of Table 1). Additionally, as can be seen in Figure 1, the links between absenteeism and outcomes were larger for Black than White students, but few other differences emerged as a function of socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, home language, and child sex. Thus, the Black-White opportunity gap was further acerbated as a result of absenteeism.

Taken together, this work moves beyond studying the end-of-year outcomes of absenteeism by highlighting the grade-specific and cumulative consequences of missing school for students across the elementary school years. In doing so, our findings underscore the importance of viewing absenteeism from a longitudinal perspective.

Authors

• Arya Ansari, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Michael A Gottfried, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author