Schools, colleges, coaching centers, and other educational institutions often find attendance tracking as well as data management as one of the crucial challenges. Thankfully, the next generation biometric authentication and presence monitoring systems have made life easy for the school administrators these days. The use of technology also promotes the involvement of parents in school affairs as the student’s presence and classroom performance data can be shared with them within minutes.
Using parents as allies can yield better results than offering rewards
When it comes to discussing strategies to improve schools attendance, the idea of offering rewards to good performers tops the list. However, recently conducted research work suggests this technique backfires. On the other hand, sending messages and involving parents can offer superb results.
• Do rewards and awards give a wrong message?
A study conducted by researchers from Harvard Kennedy School last year highlighted how the award and reward strategy does not show positive results when it comes to improving students’ turnout.
As a part of the research, 15,000 students from 14 schools located in the state of California were under observation for absenteeism. All these schools offered awards to students with good attendance. The state of California was selected, as it officially supports such schemes in educational institutions.
The rewards and awards strategy negatively impacted the attendance of students who initially scored well to win recognition according to researchers who worked on the project.
The study contradicts the popular belief around the world. Even the teachers working for the schools that were a part of the research were unable to anticipate how the rewards backfire at a later stage. The findings made it in the headlines; even the BBC publisheddetails about the project.
Behavioral scientists suggest the intention behind awards strategy might be right. However, it gives unintended messages. Students probably start believing their turnout is better than expected, and they take a relaxed approach, take leaves after the end of the monitoring period.
• Sharing the absenteeism data with parents can help
Chronic absenteeism acts as the most significant barrier to success in school and college education. Students end up missing more than 10 percent of the sessions in a year and do not even realize that their absenteeism percentage turned high. Studies suggest parents can help to resolve this issue and reduce their kid’s absenteeism by getting more involved in the school affairs.
A study conducted by Harvard Kennedy School researchers Todd Rogers and Avi Feller pointed out that text messages, in-person dialogue, and reminders about their kid’s attendance can influence parents’ approach, resulting in reduced absenteeism.
Sharing such data with parents can be possible only if the school, college, or educational institution has electronic attendance systems in place.
Digital registers not only create daily in-out attendance logs but can automatically generate a separate report for each student. The data can be forwarded to the parents via the school app by the end of the day.
What’s the best way to take attendance electronically?
Radio-frequency identification based (RFID), biometric identification based, and manual entry attendance software-based solutions are widely used in Indian educational institutions these days.
RFID based systems are probably the most automated option. Ultra High-Frequency portals need to be installed at the classroom’s entrance, and RFID ID cards need to be issued to all the students. Whenever the student enters or exits the concerned class, the RFID antenna marks the entry and exit time in the school’s ERP system.
Biometric identification based systems consist of biometric readers that need to be installed in every classroom. Students have to put a thumb on the reader or ‘hover’ the ID-card over the biometric unit before entering or exiting the class. The student’s presence automatically gets marked in the school system when he or she remains in the classroom for a specific number of hours.
Manual attendance system involves manually feeding the data in the software via mobile apps. Students can do it after entering the classroom, and then the teacher can audit, approve, and submit it in the school server within seconds.
All the systems can be easily integrated with the school ERP software. Absenteeism reports can be generated within minutes and messages, emails, app notifications can be automatically sent to the parents of the concerned students.
Which are the best features of the attendance management system?
Some organizations, especially those in tier 2, 3 cities still rely on the old school techniques involving physical hand-written registers and storing, analyzing the same to create records.
Conducting manual attendance and creating records happens to be a cumbersome task. Teachers, professors end up spending their valuable time on non-teaching responsibilities. Automated systems on the other hand offer speed and accuracy. There is no space left for incorrect entry, duplication, and ample paperwork.
Attendance records, trend reports, summaries are automatically created within minutes and stored in the school’s central database. Records can be accessed by authorized persons at any point using the school app or website. Zero human intervention is required.
Besides tracking students, the attendance management systems also help in keeping track of the working hours for teachers, administration staff, and other consultants with the help of the same biometric, access card points. It eliminates the need to manually calculate working hours, leaves, and overall working days for the staff.
The class attendance monitoring system is not an add-on anymore, as it has become a necessity for the smooth functioning of the institution. Even government schools in various Indian states are implementing such systems. In December last year, the Tamil Nadu state government introduced AI-based (face recognization) attendance system at multiple high-schools for girls.
The attendance tracker for students easily integrates with the existing schools ERP systems, apps, website and works as a single unit to optimize the institute’s performance.
If your educational institution wishes to develop a mobile application as a single platform to share attendance, homework details, exam results, schedule updates, and online fee payment, you should consider discussing your requirement with engineers at MyEdu.
