Nudges and Collaboration Platforms Can Get Parents to Help
A 2018 Harvard University study found that parents often underestimate how often their children miss school. It also found that keeping parents involved and nudging them about their children’s absenteeism led to an uptick in attendance.
“Educational interventions that inform and empower parents … can complement more intensive student-focused absenteeism interventions,” notes the study. Technology can vastly scale these interventions. Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams, which already update students’ guardians about classroom and grade performance, can be adapted to share attendance records. “Nudges,” or digital alerts, can be used to keep parents in the loop, and have also been shown to improve college students’ STEM performance.
MORE FROM EDTECH: Schools use immersive technology for assistive learning.
Immersive Classroom Technologies Can Improve Attendance
Technology is making its way into the classroom with tools that engage students a lot more than traditional lessons can. The more students are engaged, the more they will want to return to class, studies have shown.
“Having more engaging teachers increases not only attendance in the year in which the student has the teacher but also improves students’ chances of completing high school,” notes a Brookings Institution report.
K–12 teachers can use tools like VR and AR in the classroom to help students learn by doing. These tools are also fun and engaging.
According to a 2017 study published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, researchers at Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz University found that students using a virtual chemistry laboratory — equipped with Microsoft’s Kinect gesture technology — showed better retention and were able to complete complex laboratory tasks.
Students would much rather learn about dinosaurs by walking alongside them in a virtual prehistoric landscape than be taught about them by a teacher pointing to pictures with a stick. Students who are queasy in biology class can dissect frogs without using a scalpel. And what better way to learn about climate change than by learning about the diversity of the Amazonian rainforests while virtually trekking through them.
So, while some in K–12 education might dismiss things such as VR headsets as toys or distractions, they’re actually valuable tools to deepen student engagement, which in turn can help schools meaningfully combat absenteeism.