Project Description - TechQuest

Providing Assistance to Absent Students

Educational Need
Personal experience has shown that on any given day between 10% and 20% of students are absent from school.  The reasons for absences are many: illness, school business, family vacations, suspension, skipping, etc.  Many of these reasons are beyond a student’s control.  Absent students miss instructional time: going over previous assignments, direct instruction, discussion, guided practice on new material, and new assignments.  Academic performance of absent students tends to suffer; with performance degrading further with prolonged absences.  The traditional method of assisting absent students is to attempt to send home textbooks, hardcopies of worksheets, and possibly notes, and hoping the student works on them.  Otherwise, the teacher waits for a student to return and hands him/her a pile of work and gives a brief explanation during bell time.  It is challenging for the teacher to get students “caught up” when they return.  It generally cannot be accomplished during the school day as new instruction is occurring.  Before or after school sessions are difficult to schedule unless students have a source of transportation.  Lunch sessions are inconvenient for both the teacher and the student and are often too short to be effective.  The worst case scenario is that lessons do not get made up or the student resorts to copying (without understanding) the work of other students to get out from under a backlog of assignments.  Chronically absent students may become frustrated and drop out.  With the current emphasis on high stakes testing, even a few absences can affect student outcomes.  With more and more states linking teacher pay to student performance, teachers need to take the issue of attendance to heart.  Realistically, the methods suggested here can benefit all students, not just the absent ones.

The Role of Technology
Technology can be used to mitigate the negative impacts of absences in several ways.  Technology allows lessons to be “captured” and accessed at a time and place that is convenient for the student.  Technology allows students access to the teacher and classmates outside of school hours and allows students to submit assignments while they are out of school.  Technology is not a complete solution to the problem as accessibility can be an issue for students of lower socioeconomic status.  For prolonged, scheduled absences, it may be possible to loan the necessary technology to students as long as they have connectivity.

Relevant Research
There is not an abundance of research in this area.  I suspect that this due to the fact that most public schools view attendance as a student problem, not a teaching problem. The research I’ve found focuses on college attendance. Results are generally anecdotal, largely due to poor tracking of student attendance at the college level.  One study (Randy Moore.  (2003). Attendance and performance. Journal of College Science Teaching, 32(6), 367-371) states that there is a strong correlation between attendance and high performance and between low attendance and poor performance.  The study cautions that teacher efforts may not help students with chronic attendance issues, “Poorly motivated students who miss lots of classes will probably make the lowest grades, despite our best efforts to help them learn by offering extended office hours, help sessions, and so forth” (Moore, p. 391).

Resources
There should be no additional technology costs for this project as all the hardware and software needed is currently available within the high school or can be set up using Web 2.0 technology available through the internet.  The real investment will be in teacher time; time to learn to use the technology and time to create the instructional materials.

Plan for Implementation
There are many possibilities to be explored. and not all of them can be fully implemented in an 8 week course.  Options that will be considered initially are:

•    making the online version of the textbook available to students (possible immediately)
•    making electronic copies of handouts and worksheets available to students and encouraging them to return work electronically (possible immediately)
•    providing links to online resources that cover the content missed (possible immediately)
•    capturing discussion notes using an interactive whiteboard and posting them to the class website (requires experimentation - easily accomplished short term)
•    capturing lessons using podcasting/videocasting technology and posting them to the class website (requires experimentation - longer term)

Addressing the Four Common Places of Education 
The role of the teacher in this project is to capture instructional objects and make them accessible to students in a timely manner, be available for answering questions and assessing performance outside of school hours, and providing regular feedback to students during extended absences.
 
The role of the learner is to be responsible for taking advantage of the options offered and to do so in a timely manner.
 
The subject matter for this project will be limited to high school chemistry but the methods could be adapted to almost any subject area.
 
There are multiple settings for the project.  The teacher will be generating many of the materials at school, some concurrent with the actual lessons.  Others will need to be generated during planning periods or away from the school.  The setting for the student can be at school, at home, or even “on the road”.