The Causes of Absenteeism among Grade One to Grade Six Pupils of Kayquit Elementary School From August to October School Year 2018-2019

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

All pupils, yet for one reason or another want to miss a day in school. The general tendency to engage in such unwillingness is referred to absenteeism.

Absenteeism has negative effect on the performance and academic achievement of the pupils. It also becomes a hindrance to their success later in school. Frequent absences can also lead to a more serious problem of school dropout. Moreover, absenteeism also affects the ability of the teacher to deliver the lesson properly and also those pupils who are present every day. Since absenteeism became one of the problems in our school, we resort to find out the reason behind the absences of most Grade I pupils. Through identifying the underlying reasons, we can now make better strategies to minimize if not totally eradicate absenteeism.

METHODS

The purposive sampling design was used. Using the sampling technique, we identified the pupils who got 3 or more absences per month. Questionnaires which the 30 Grade I pupils have responded focused on the reasons of absences such as physical, health , personal attitude, teacher-related, classroom atmosphere, and home-related factor. Frequency count, percentage and mean was also used for data analysis.

RESULTS

Results showed that in the presented 6 factors that causes absenteeism among Grade I-VI pupils, Physical Factor with a mean of 2.43 emerged as the primary reason of absenteeism among pupils. It is followed by Personal Attitude with a mean of 2.28, Health Factor with 2.17, Home-Related Factor with 2.11, Classroom Atmosphere with 1.63 and Teacher-Related Factor with a lowest mean of 1.25 respectively.

DISCUSSIONS

Observation and monitoring of pupil's daily attendance helped the teachers to identify the pupils who committed more than 3 absences a month. Through this monitoring, the teachers come up with this research to identify the reason behind absenteeism. After several procedures, the results revealed that Physical Factor was the primary cause of absenteeism among Grade I-VI pupils of Kayquit Elementary School. The result of this study will be disseminated to the parent or guardians of the concerned pupils so that they will be guided properly also to those parents of pupils who are at risk for absenteeism. Since incentives and rewards seem to be an effective way to increase school attendance, the school will have Perfect Pal as intervention program to lower or minimize absenteeism among pupils. The school will also test for the effectiveness of the said intervention program in the next research.