Background: Insufficient sleep in adolescents has been shown to be associated with a wide variety of adverse outcomes, from poor mental and physical health to behavioral problems and lower academic grades. However, most high school students do not get sufficient sleep. Delaying school start times for adolescents has been proposed as a policy…

Primary and secondary school in Nigeria encourage punctuality to school yet a good number of the learners came late to school. This is especially true in the case of day students. Learners who come late to school are usually punished in one way or the other yet the lateness to school phenomenon still persist. Lateness to school behaviour affects…

This chapter tells the story of how and why one student who received a ticket for being late to school joined the fight against policies that criminalize students in Los Angeles Unified School District.

The "School Refusal Assessment Scale" (SRAS) was developed to identify four factors that might maintain a youth's school attendance problem (SAP), and thus be targeted for treatment. There is still limited support for the four-factor model inherent to the SRAS and its revision (SRAS-R). Recent studies indicate problems with the wording…

Many schools are faced with the prospect of soaring absenteeism rates, despite the use of traditional truancy courts and other legal interventions. A recent trend in the literature has been to explore alternative, hybrid, and multidisciplinary approaches to address the underlying obstacles to school attendance. These programs are often integrated…

This article, written by three research-active teachers with the support of their academic partner, interrogates the achievement-attendance link in the most recent government quantitative data for secondary schools in England: persistent absentees stands at 6.6% for all children, but it raises to 9% for students who are classed as "Pupil…

Many urban high schools serving low-income families have below-average attendance rates, which can indicate that fewer students are prepared to matriculate into college and career opportunities. Through the use of participatory action research (PAR), we--a group of four educators at Wilson High School--have changed school policies and procedures…

School attendance can be an early indicator that something is going wrong with a student. Gathering, analyzing, and acting on attendance information is a first step toward school improvement. Meanwhile, the majority of the states are moving to build and enhance what are called "early warning systems," intended to flag at-risk students during their…

The primary objective of this article is to see if and how attendance policy influences class attendance in undergraduate-level principles of macroeconomics classes. The second objective, which is related to the first, is to examine whether the nature of the attendance policy matters in terms of its impact on class attendance behavior. The results…

Supposedly designed to improve student attendance, the aggressive truancy policing in Los Angeles (LA) has discouraged students from going to class and often pushes them to drop out and into harm's way. Truancy tickets play a role in the school-to-prison pipeline. Students are being brought up in an environment that is a pre-prisoning of youth. LA…

With the emergence of the Democratic South Africa, a number of disciplinary problems emerged. One of these problems is truancy of school children from schools. The South African Schools Act (1996, p. 6) provides that if a learner who is subject to "compulsory attendance" fails to attend a school, the HODS (heads of departments) may take…

To assess whether a 5-month program involving attendance monitoring, sports participation, and a moral character class would reduce absenteeism, 40 students in a small transitional high school were randomly assigned to intervention and control groups and assessed pre- and postintervention on educational expectations, attitude toward education, and…

School refusal behavior refers to child-motivated refusal to attend school and/or difficulty attending classes for an entire day (Kearney & Silverman, 1996). As such, the term represents an umbrella construct for many historical ones that have been used to describe youths with problematic absenteeism, including truancy, psychoneurotic truancy,…

A major problem faced by schools across the country is student absenteeism. Although the problem is pervasive in American schools, the attention focused on this issue has been inadequate. Poor student attendance has far reaching effects on the individual, the school, and society in general. The intent of this paper is to document the problem,…

This paper reports the findings of a study set up to establish the impact of a particular scheme on the attendance and punctuality performance of a group of Basic Skills learners against the backdrop of various theoretical postulations on managing undesirable behavior. Data collected on learners' performance was subjected to statistical analysis…