Assessing Attendance by Peer Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Relative Attendance Index (RAI), a new method that uses peer attendance data to more accurately measure student engagement across different courses and learning environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel peer-based attendance metric, RAI, addressing heterogeneity in attendance data and improving the assessment of student motivation and behavior.

Findings

RAI correlates better with student engagement than traditional methods

Experimental results validate RAI's effectiveness on real-world data

RAI enables fairer comparisons across diverse courses and settings

Abstract

Attendance rate is an important indicator of students' study motivation, behavior and Psychological status; However, the heterogeneous nature of student attendance rates due to the course registration difference or the online/offline difference in a blended learning environment makes it challenging to compare attendance rates. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Relative Attendance Index (RAI) to measure attendance rates, which reflects students' efforts on attending courses. While traditional attendance focuses on the record of a single person or course, relative attendance emphasizes peer attendance information of relevant individuals or courses, making the comparisons of attendance more justified. Experimental results on real-life data show that RAI can indeed better reflect student engagement.