A Mathematical Meta Model of Academic Attainment Based on Class Attendance and Socio-Economic Changes

Abstract

The performance of students depend on many factors such as, attendance, motivation, level of engagement etc. which may be considered as the students attributes towards learning and some other attributes of the teachers on the process. No research is available relating the academic attainment and class attendance of our universities, especially at KUET where a 60% mandatory attendance is imposed to appear in the final examination. Though there exist many factors on student academic attainment, namely Class Test Marks and Final Grade, here we are interested and selected one important factor namely class attendance. There are many departments in this university (KUET) and a lot of subjects are taught. But Mathematics is common to all. Hence Mathematics is chosen for this study. This study is done among the students of first year and second year in several engineering departments regarding mathematics courses during the period 2000 -2013. It is of no doubt that for the existence of many proxy variables (Teacher’s attribute, student’s attribute, subjects, socio-economic environment etc.), it is very difficult to assess the impact of class attendance on academic attainment. Moreover, due to impose of mandatory percentage on class attendance, it becomes much more difficult to find out the impact of attendance on Class Test Marks as well as on Final Grade. In this study we have considered only existing old data (student attendance and academic performance), where the effect of proxy variables are ignored. Moreover, for better comparison as well as for finding some test statistics, all the data are normalized. We have rigorously studied about the correlation between class Attendance and Class Test Marks for each course. We have also investigated thoroughly in each course for the existence of correlation between class Attendance and Final Grade. In spite of 60% mandatory attendance, from the experimental results, it revealed that attendance has a great effect on academic attainments. But the effect is varying department to department as well as semester to semester. Though there exist correlations between Attendance and Class Test Marks but there exist relatively much strong correlation between Attendance and Final Grade in perceptive of all departments. It reveals that class attendance grow some intuitive knowledge to the students which affect on their final Grade. According to the existence of correlations, some Meta regression models are proposed regarding both Class Test Marks and Final grade depending on attendance. Though for the lacking of continuous data, we could not find out socioeconomic effect on academic attainment but it is revealed from the experimental study that introducing any new system effect on Attendance as well as academic performance.