How to Track Attendance in Reading Sessions

A reading program can have good stories, good quizzes and a willing teacher, and still fail because pupils are not in the room. Attendance is the first record to get right. It is also the easiest to keep badly: a tick on paper, a different rule in each class, and nobody looking at the totals. This article sets out what to record and what to do with it. It reports what research found on absence and achievement, and on telling parents the real number of absences. It says whose pupils those studies covered.

How do you track attendance in reading sessions?

Track attendance in reading sessions by recording, for each session, which pupils were enrolled and which were present. Use the same rule for 'present' in every class. Keep the record in one place, and look at it on a fixed day each week. A record that nobody reads changes nothing.

Five things are worth recording. The table shows why each one matters and what to do with it.

Write the definitions down, so that every class counts the same way.

Does attendance affect achievement? What research found

Three studies are worth knowing. All three are from the United States, and none is about reading sessions in an EFL program.

Gottfried (2010) matters because of its method. Pupils who attend more may differ from other pupils in ways that also affect their results. He used a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of days present. The results were consistent for elementary and middle school pupils.

Gershenson, Jacknowitz and Brannegan (2017) add two details for language teachers. In the North Carolina data, the harm from absence was greater among low-income pupils and English language learners, particularly for reading. Unexcused absences were twice as harmful as excused ones. Those pupils were learning English in an English-speaking country, which is not the same as EFL.

Credé, Roch and Kieszczynka (2010) studied college students, so their result is furthest from a school classroom. They found that attendance predicted grades better than any other known predictor, including admissions test scores and study habits. It was only weakly related to motivation and conscientiousness. Our reading is that turning up is a separate thing to track. It is not a stand-in for effort.

A caution. These studies measured whole school days or college classes. None measured attendance at a weekly reading session, and none was run with EFL pupils aged 8 to 16. They support a reasonable expectation, not a promise.

Being present is not the same as taking part

An attendance mark says that a pupil was there. It does not say that the pupil read. In a classroom, you can see a pupil turning pages or staring at the wall. Online, a name on the screen tells you much less. A pupil can join, switch off the camera and leave the room.

So record one sign of taking part next to the attendance mark. Choose something the session already produces, so that it costs the teacher no extra time.

• Reading done. The pupil reached the end of the unit set for the session.
• Quiz answered. The pupil answered the questions after the reading, whatever the score.
• A spoken or written response. One sentence about the story, said to a partner or typed in the chat.

None of the studies cited in this article tests which of these signs works best. This is advice from practice. Treat the sign as a prompt for a conversation, not as proof. A pupil who was present and answered nothing may have had a bad connection, or a story that was too hard. For the session itself, see how to run an in-school reading session.

What to do with the record each week

Set a fixed day and spend ten minutes on the record. Work through the same steps each time.

1. List the pupils who missed the last two sessions in a row. One miss may be chance. Two is early enough to act.
2. Look at the timetable before the pupil. If the absent pupils share a session time, a club or a bus, the problem is the slot.
3. Speak to the pupil. Ask what got in the way. Offer another session for the same unit if there is one.
4. Check pupils who were present but did no work. Look at the level of the story first.
5. Tell the parent if the pattern continues. Give the number of sessions missed, not a general warning.
6. Write down what you changed. Next week, check whether it helped.

A pupil who misses every Thursday session may have a clash, not a bad attitude. Where you can, offer the same unit at more than one time. Let Students Choose Their Session explains how that works. The article on flexible class scheduling covers the choice of times.

The Education Endowment Foundation (2022) reviewed 72 studies of attendance interventions. It found some evidence of promise for responsive approaches, which target the individual causes of a pupil's low attendance. It also judged the overall quality of the evidence to be weak. All but three of the 72 studies took place in the USA.

Tell parents the real number

Parents often do not know how many sessions their child has missed. Rogers and Feller (2018) tested what happens when they are told. They ran a randomised experiment in the School District of Philadelphia. It involved the parents of 28,080 students at high risk of absence, from kindergarten to grade 12. Parents received one of three kinds of personalised information by post, repeatedly through the school year, or no extra information.

The most effective versions reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more. The authors report that this worked partly by correcting parents' biased beliefs about their child's total absences. The reduction was comparable across grade levels.

Robinson, Lee, Dearing and Rogers (2018) describe a survey from that study. Parents of high-absence students estimated that their child had missed 9.6 days, on average. The real figure was 17.8. Their own experiment covered ten school districts, with pupils from kindergarten to grade 5. It targeted parents' beliefs about the value of attendance and about the number of days missed. It decreased chronic absenteeism by 15%.

Both experiments were in US school districts and counted whole days of school. Nobody has tested the same message for a weekly reading session. The Education Endowment Foundation (2022) found a very small positive impact, on average, for communication with parents. It asked readers to treat its results with caution.

The practical lesson is to send the count, in plain words and without blame.

For the wider report, see reporting reading progress to parents.

Privacy: who should see the attendance record?

An attendance record is personal data about a child. Keep it to the staff who need it to do their job. This section is practice, not research, and privacy law differs from country to country. Check the rules that apply to your school.

• The class teacher sees named records for their own pupils.
• The coordinator sees named records across classes, to spot patterns in the timetable.
• School leaders see totals by class and grade. They see a named record only when acting on one case.
• A parent sees their own child's record and nobody else's.
• Other pupils and the public see nothing with a name on it.

Do not post attendance lists on a wall or in a group chat. Do not record a reason for absence in more detail than you need. 'Medical' is enough. If a platform keeps the record for you, ask who can see it and how long it is kept. Student Data Privacy: Questions to Ask an EdTech Vendor has a fuller list.

Common mistakes in attendance tracking

• Counting logins. A login is a visit. It is not a session attended.
• Reporting only the class average. An average of 85% can hide three pupils who never come.
• Changing the rule mid-term. If the definition of 'present' changes, say so next to the numbers.
• Using the record to punish. Pupils who fear the register may find ways to be marked present without reading.
• Collecting and not looking. Put the weekly review in the timetable, with a named owner.

These points come from practice, not from the studies above. What Teachers Should See in a Reading Dashboard sets it next to reading done and words retained.

How iRead handles this

In iRead, a session is a live class, online or in school, that students enrol in themselves. Attendance is recorded automatically. Admins or teachers can publish several sessions for the same unit, and each student joins exactly one, the one they can attend. A quiz runs after every session. Individual student data is visible only to the school's own staff.

Key takeaway

Keep one record, with one rule for 'present' and one sign of taking part. Review it weekly, fix the timetable first, and give parents the real number of sessions missed.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Gottfried, M. A. (2010). Evaluating the relationship between student attendance and achievement in urban elementary and middle schools: An instrumental variables approach. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 434-465. doi.org/10.3102/0002831209350494
2. Gershenson, S., Jacknowitz, A., & Brannegan, A. (2017). Are student absences worth the worry in U.S. primary schools?. Education Finance and Policy, 12(2), 137-165. doi.org/10.1162/EDFP_a_00207
3. Credé, M., Roch, S. G., & Kieszczynka, U. M. (2010). Class attendance in college: A meta-analytic review of the relationship of class attendance with grades and student characteristics. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 272-295. doi.org/10.3102/0034654310362998
4. Rogers, T., & Feller, A. (2018). Reducing student absences at scale by targeting parents' misbeliefs. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(5), 335-342. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0328-1
5. Robinson, C. D., Lee, M. G., Dearing, E., & Rogers, T. (2018). Reducing student absenteeism in the early grades by targeting parental beliefs. American Educational Research Journal, 55(6), 1163-1192. doi.org/10.3102/0002831218772274
6. Education Endowment Foundation (2022). Attendance Interventions: Rapid Evidence Assessment. Education Endowment Foundation, London. d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/documents/pages/Attendance-REA-report.pdf