Monitoring lecture attendance as a tool for understanding student performance

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Background: Time management has been a major factor for students in the fourth-year undergraduate medicine resulting in some not attending lectures at the author's university, and as a result the pass rate has not been optimal. Through correlating student performance against attendance, it has been interesting to assess how attendance impacted their learning. Purpose: 1) To monitor students' attendance at lectures using a mobile student card reader; and 2) to correlate the attendance with performance to understand the relationship for individual students, and as a class. Method: A pilot study using a mobile electronic card swiping machine connected to the university network and software application, to obtain the attendance data of the 2015 academic year correlated with the four semester tests and final examination marks. Results: In a class of 175 students two of the top 10 students attended below 50%, and three students who failed both the tests and the final examination attended less than 20%. Three others were also identified as poorly performing despite above 80% attendance. Conclusion: Monitoring attendance and correlating it with performance has identified students at risk, and provided an understanding of how lectures contributed in the individual student's learning. Whilst counselling, sharing attendance trends with the student has promoted reflection and behaviour change.