Interested in using Schoolzilla dashboards to monitor and improve student attendance? Great! The Our Students Student Intervention Group feature can help you with this. We’ve pulled some research-backed recommendations and strategies from Attendance Works to help you.
How Do I Analyze Data? What Are Meaningful Intervention Groups?
Attendance Works recommends a 3-tiered system of support.
On Our Students, you’ll want to create these 3 groups (video here):
| Name | Description | Criteria |
|---|---|---|
| Attendance Tier 1-At-Risk | At-risk of becoming chronically absent, 90-94.9% | Attendance rate 90-95% |
| Attendance Tier 2-Chronic | Moderate chronic absence, 80-89.9% | Attendance rate 80-90% |
| Attendance Tier 3-Severe | Severe chronic absence, <80%></80%> | Attendance rate <80%></80%> |
You can also create a 4th group for Tier 1-Satisfactory (95%+ attendance) if you want to have all students in a group.
Note: If you create the groups and share them with others, they will not be able to add students to nor remove students from the group that has been shared with them. If it’s important for others to be able to do that (e.g., if that’s a responsibility of a site administrator moving forward), you’ll want to share the above table and ask them to create their own groups.
How Can I Help Students and Improve Attendance?
Attendance Works recommends 5 basic steps:
- Review specific strategies for each step by attendance tier TIERED-RESOURCES-WORKSHEET-VERSION-7-29-2015.docx (217.5 KB).
- Create your own action plan - template.
How Are We Doing with Improving Attendance?
You’ll want to monitor student data and modify your action plan as needed. Here’s a suggested protocol:
- On Our Students, create your attendance groups as described above and export results. This will allow you to have a historical record of what each student’s attendance rate was at the start of your intervention and which group they were placed in initially. Save this somewhere securely.
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Schedule a time once a week or once every other week to review group data (put it on your calendar!). This could be done independently, as part of pre-work for another meeting, or in a data review meeting.
Review the students’ group icons to see if they are still in this attendance band or have improved. If you want to be more precise, you can compare their attendance rate to your original export.
Be sure to look for new students who now meet the group’s criteria.
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Review strategies and progress once a month (put it on your calendar!). This should be a group discussion to assess what’s working and what’s not for different students. For students who are continuing to struggle, brainstorm new strategies and then decide on a few to try out for the next month.
Here is a template you could use to review performance and evaluate strategies. If there is capacity, we recommend exporting the results and comparing with the original data to more precisely analyze who has improved and what average improvement has been.