A great example of PowerBI allowing schools to identify trends in student absences
I came across the above PowerBI dashboard and shared it because many schools are still very interested in using data driven insights to make smarter decisions in their schools and where to concentrate effort and resources.
You can see the original post about the Absence Reduction Report here and if you want to interact directly with the data in the report and see how it works then click below:
Click To Interact With Absence Reduction Report
The original report noted:
One of the most valuable aspects of growing in digital maturity, is to use data to provide insights into our area of influence. The use of Power BI to build this Absence Reduction Report is a powerful example of how new technology has transformed a school administrations’ ability to track their student’s attendance and identify strategies for reducing absences for schools, teachers, or by subject.
Now, I’ve helped build attendance reports in previous roles and they certainly can turn up some interesting insights into student behaviour. Conventional wisdom certainly suggests that the higher attendance a student maintains, the more opportunities they have to learn and thus perform better in academic attesting. I’ve worked in schools where this is absolutely true, yet the PowerBI reports we build at StAC did not always support this.
Some of the students who had the lowest attendance (in some cases, under 70%) was not because they were “skipping class” but more that they were arguably over-committed and busy attending other school events such as sports exchanges, music performances or leadership training. These highly motivated students were effective in catching up on missed class time and consequently did not appear to suffer too much academically.
This won’t be true for all students of course, however the point I’m making here is that only through accurate data analysis can a true view of student performance and the impact of variable attendance be evaluated. It’s no longer acceptable to make decisions based off a “hunch” as to what is going on – as the quote above indicated, the use of data when making decisions is one indicator of a growing digital maturity.
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