Importance of Attendance in a Continuous Assessment System.

Please keep in mind that this is more of a blog and less of a scientific paper. To be honest, I just did not want all those real data to go to waste. 

In Nepal, academic session grade comes from end of the term final examination only. That is the way my parents got their grades, I got mine and my younger sibling got hers. However, things are thankfully changing now. Last year, we implemented Edcrayon in one of Kathmandu valleys' most reputed schools. The adoption allowed the school to easily transition from traditional end term assessment model to continuous assessment model. This implied that students would have to perform on a regular basis to get good grades. Unlike during my school days, mugging the entire course syllabus before the final exam would not help anymore. 

Similarly, most schools also had an allocated number of days for final exam review just before the exams. These review period entirely focused on the sort of materials that would be tested on the exam. Unfortunately, students were basically being prepared to pass the test. This also meant that even if students missed a significant number of school days, it would not really matter too much with their grades since they exactly knew what they had to prepare and mug up. Therefore, it is really difficult to identify the impact of attendance on grades in traditional grading system. 

However, with the introduction of Continuous Assessment System, since final grade is basically a summation or curation of student performance throughout the academic session, I wanted to study if student attendance had an impact on the final grade.

Is there a correlation between kindergartener's attendance rate vs final grades? Similarly, is there a correlation between a middle schooler's attendance rate vs final grades? I had access to real academic data for a school and wanted to enquire the relationship.

Null Hypothesis:
There is no relationship between attendance and final grades in continuos assessment model.

Class KG

Number of students: 11

Note that the sample size in this case is very very small. The number of students in Kindergarten level were only 11 in the school we worked with.

Class: 4 (Three sections)

Number of students: 104

In both cases, r is greater than 1 which implies positive correlation. Also, correlation is significant at 0.05 and 0.01 respectively. Therefore, we can reject the null hypothesis. 

Students benefit from being present in the class in continuous assessment system.

We are on the verge of launching Tootle. However, this prototype of an app for displaying real time Sajha bus location on the map was a stepping stone. This only served one static location. Now the algorithms are adjusted to support n dynamic routes.

I recently stumbled upon a customer loyalty measurement scale termed Net Promoter Scale (NPS in short) via a conversation with a businessy friend of mine who was researching on it. I was truly amazed by the simplicity yet brilliance of NPS. Moreover, this is ideal for someone like me who wants to get honest customer feedback without harassing them with poorly designed questionnaires regarding a product. 

The pith of NPS lies in the question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Those who respond with a score of 9-10 are called Promoters, and are considered likely to show positive behaviors like repeat purchase and positive referrals. Those who respond with a score of 0-6 are labeled Detractors, and they are believed to exhibit the negative behaviors like driving away from the brand, negative referrals. Responses of 7 and 8 are labeled Passives, and their behavior falls in the middle of Promoters and Detractors.

The NPS Calculation formula

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

NPS ranges from -100 to 100 (inclusive).

With me doing the charting part and my friend doing the result implication and significance part we developed a simple NPS calculator app that takes total detractors, passives and promotors to output NPS. Refer to the screenshots below to identify what different NPS score signify. 

Visit my friend's blog post on same topic for more information about NPS including it's pros and cons.