Class attendance and student performance: A case study of Kafue Secondary Schools

Student class attendance is not only important to the performance of the education sector in Zambia, but also to the country’s economic productivity. Despite the removal of examination fees at junior secondary level, student performance in junior secondary examinations is low in Zambia. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which class attendance of students in public day secondary schools is linked to their performance.
The study utilised 2014 Grade 9 final examinations data on composite scores from ECZ and data from school administrative records to analyse the effect of class attendance on student performance in public day secondary schools of Kafue district. The data were also used to assess students’ performance by geographical location and gender. The study applied Instrumental Variables (IV) regression strategy to assess the effect of attendance on performance, while t-tests were used to analyse the difference in student performance by school location and gender.
Study findings show that attending an extra day of class increases student average composite score by 0.670. The results also show significant differences in student performance with students in urban schools having higher mean scores than those from the rural schools at 1 percent level of significance. Similarly, males performed better than females with a significant difference at 1 percent level.
In view of these findings, Government and communities need to work together to build more secondary schools to reduce inter school distances. It is vital for policy makers to consider providing all schools with enough resource allocations for educational materials and libraries. The findings also call for the need to have Government and school authorities sensitise communities to support the education of girls and invest more resources to make schools more “girl friendly”.