Class Attendance and Gender Effects on Undergraduate Students’ Achievement in a Social Studies Course in Botswana.

The study examined class attendance and gender effects on undergraduate students’ achievement in a Social Studies course. The whole group of seventy six (76) year three undergraduate students of the department of primary education, University of Botswana who registered for the course constituted the study sample. The record of students’ attendance in the course taken from the beginning of the semester was computed and compared with their overall score in the course. Multiple comparisons, Analysis of Variance and T-test were used to analyse the data to determine the relative and interaction effects of the independent variables on the dependent. Two research hypotheses were tested for significance at .05 probability level. The results indicate that students’ level of attendance has a significant influence on their academic performance in Social Studies. It was also found that gender has a significant effect on the subjects’ performances with male students performing better than their female counterparts. Implications of these findings for appropriate remediation programmes for low attendance students were discussed. Introduction Academic freedom in tertiary educational institutions provides students with opportunities to absent themselves from classes. The rates of absenteeism defer from one institution to another and various reasons are being adduced for this. One of the crucial factors for students’ learning achievement is attendance at class. This is more important in an institution that is not operating fully on-line instructions, and presumably where other resources are not available, where students will depend heavily on what they hear from their teachers. In this kind of scenario, it is imperative that students attend classes regularly to benefit maximally from their teachers. In the University of Botswana where this study was carried out, on-line instructions is not fully operated in all courses, hence class attendance is highly essential (UBel, 2002).However, over the years, it has been noticed that a majority of students in the University regularly absent themselves from lectures. Various anecdotal reasons have been advanced for this noticeable absenteeism among students, principal among which are: ill-health (which accounts for more than 50% of the cases); attendance at relatives’ burial funerals (which ranks close to ill-health) and some other ephemeral reasons. The rate of absenteeism is so high that the University authority has designed a form for students to complete indicating reason(s) for not attending classes. 1 Ajiboye and Tella: Class Attendance and Gender Effects Published by OpenRiver, 2006 With regards to the two major reasons identified above, some explanations could be advanced to support the two reasons. First, it is on record that the states of health facilities in Botswana have been stretched due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic (NACA, MOH, 2003). The country sentinel report presented in 2003 shows that 38.5% of the adult population are now infected. This population cohort forms the bulk of the students in primary education department (in-service teachers) who took the course used for this study. Therefore it could be deduced that most sickness reports in the University, could be attributed to this pandemic. The explanation for the second reason is closely related to the above. As a result of the ravaging effects of the HIV/AIDS, many deaths are recorded daily, and since these students are members of these communities they lose their relatives and friends frequently, which ultimately warrant them to leave the school to attend burial ceremonies.