Lab Attendance and Academic Performance

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International Scholarly Research Network ISRN Education Volume 2012, Article ID 364176, 5 pages doi:10.5402/2012/364176 Research Article Lab Attendance and Academic Performance Kirk Adair and Omari H. Swinton Department of Economics, Howard University, Washington, DC, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Kirk Adair, kadair@howard.edu Received 26 March 2012; Accepted 2 May 2012 Academic Editors: M. Brynin, K. Capps, M. F. Cerda, and H.-C. Lin Copyright © 2012 K. Adair and O. H. Swinton. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The benefits from attendance of lectures have been established in the literature. This paper focuses on attendance not of the lecture, but of smaller labs. These labs are 50 minutes one-day-a-week sessions to emphasis material covered during lecture. Using a 200student Principles of Economics class that covers microeconomics with six different labs, we investigate the effect of lab attendance on exam performance by taking into account individual characteristics. We find that lab attendance benefits the student in overall exam performance. 1. Introduction Many studies have been done on absenteeism and how it affects student performance. The convention in the academia is that poor class attendance negatively affects final grades. The traditional approach to university instruction is largely based on physical attendance and exam performance. Studies have shown that attendance does matter for academic performance (see e.g., Durden and Ellis [1], Devadoss and Foltz [2], Romer [3], Stanca [4], Marburger [5], Dobkin, R. Gil, and J. Marion [6], and Marburger [7]). This evidence has led to mandatory attendance in some undergraduate courses. However,

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