Attendance Cards Scanning: Its Impact on the Attendance Rate and Learning Habits of Grade 12 ICT/CSS Students of Victoria Senior High School, Victoria, Laguna

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The physical record of the students' attendance has been an issue to the teachers as it plays an important part in the monitoring and evaluation of their academic performance during the teaching-learning engagement. It is also a means for parents to track their children's presence in the school. In this action research, the proponents provided intervention for teachers in monitoring their class attendance using an Android application that can be downloaded and installed in their smart cellphones for free. Through this application, attendance record will be available for the students and parents anytime without browsing a bulk of traditional attendance sheets.

METHODS

This action research adopted the descriptive method of research as suggested by Hall (2014). The design helped researchers plan and carry out research. It is also designed to provide rich descriptive details about people, places and other phenomena. It often involves extensive observation and note-taking as well as in-depth narrative. Hence, this kind of research design was used to know the effectiveness of the checking of attendance using SAM generated Attendance Cards (AC) to the students' increase of attendance rate. We also used the purposive random sampling wherein a typical case sampling was highlighted. We conducted a daily scanning and monitoring of attendance to our thirty-eight (38) ICT/CSS Grade 12 students using SAM (Scan Attendance Manager) generated Attendance Card for three (3) consecutive months. We gathered the Percentage of their 3 months attendance using the AC for comparative analysis from the previous months where the traditional pen-paper method was used. Then, we conducted a survey to evaluate the effect of the intervention on the students' learning progress.

RESULTS

From the data gathered, for three months of using the Generated AC compared to the traditional checking of class attendance, there was an increase of 21 % in the attendance of students in the month of July (pen-paper method of checking the attendance) compared to the December (using SAM Generated AC) monthly attendance. It is noted that the increase showed a positive impact on the students' attitude in coming to school. 59% Strongly Agreed, 35% Agreed and 4% Disagreed on the importance of monitoring class attendance while 62% of the respondents Strongly Agreed, 29% Agreed and 9% Disagreed on the effect of using AC in the attendance monitoring. Henceforth, there was a significant difference in the use of AC in monitoring the attendance of their class to the academic progress of Grade 12 ICT/CSS students.

DISCUSSIONS

The study revealed that teachers' creative and innovative ways of conducting the learning process affect their students' learning progress. Interest and enthusiasm of the students are manifested through their diligence in attending their classes. Interventions using available technology assisted the teachers in their delivery of the teaching-learning process.