Student Attendance Audit

How do I track Student Absences Over a Time Period That I Choose?

There are many situations where you might like to know the attendance numbers and totals for students for a certain week, month, or other period of time you determine. For example, if you are doing an attendance incentive group you'll want to be able to check the weekly attendance for that group each Friday. Or maybe you've created a school-wide incentive for perfect attendance for the month of September (Attendance Awareness Month!) and you need to know who gets the prize. This is the report you'll want to use.

Continue reading for instructions on how to use this report. 

How to Run This Report

Before you begin you'll want to decide what group of students you need this data for. If it is for a particular grade level, alphabetical group, or a hand-picked group of students. Here are a few methods of selection to consider:

• Create a group and select it. Here's more on working with a group. This could be your PLT group or any other customized group of students, such as an attendance check in group. 

• Select all students for a particular school (choose All at the end of the alphabet list on the start page).  Make sure you choose the right school in the top right drop-down menu.

• Use any of the search methods on the start page to select a certain homeroom, age, or narrow your selection by any other criteria found in the function list to the right of your search bar.

Next, choose the year or term as well as the school you want to work with by choosing from the drop-down boxes in the top right corner. 

Once you have your students selected then click on System Reports on the left side-bar.

On the following reports page click on Student Attendance Audit under the Attendance section.

You'll now see the options page for the Student Attendance Audit report. Leave the Attendance Mode and Attendance Conversion tabs on Use Default setting. I'm not sure why, but if you choose daily or meeting you'll just get zeros on the report. 

Next choose which students to include. I had already selected 38 students using a stored selection that I previously made, so I chose the bubble The selected 38 students only to run the report on those students. 

You can also further define your report by grade level here. For example, click the boxes next to K, 1, and 2 to limit your results to only the lower grades at your school. I use this feature if I have a stored selection of a mixed-grade group of students and I only want to see a report of a certain grade level. This is easier than creating 6 different stored selections for each grade. 

Finally, you need to choose the time period for which you want to see their attendance totals. You can either choose from preset reporting segments (usually set by quarters, etc.) or put in your own specific date range. Type in the beginning and ending dates or click the calendar icon if you're a more visual person. Make sure to choose the bubble to the left of the reporting segment or time period you have selected. 

You can also choose to include student numbers in the report by checking this box at the bottom. 

After making sure you have chosen the settings you need, click submit.

Once your report has finished running, click view to see it. You may need to click refresh to make sure the report is finished to view. 

Your Finished Report

Here is what your report will look like. You'll see the student name listed on the left-hand side followed by the student number (if you checked this box). 

The table shows all the dates in the range you selected. So on this example we are looking at Monday-Friday for the week of November 3-7. It indicates the number of the day as well as the day of the week with a M,T, W, H, or F.

1.00 means present

0.00 means absent

Summary Data

The Att column gives you a total number of present days for that student over the given time period. So in this example if a student has a 5.00 in this column it means they were present for the whole week. 

The Memb column shows the total number of days that student could have possibly been present during the given time period. So for each child in this example it shows a 5.00. This can be particularly helpful if you're looking at a large span of time because you can subtract the Att column from the Memb column to quickly know how many absences that student had. 

At the very bottom of the page you have the Grand Totals for the whole group of students by day and for the time period as a whole. This could be useful if you wanted to run this report for several different classes or grades to compare their summary attendance data over a certain time period. 

That's all there is to it! I hope you find this report as useful as I have. I use it on a weekly basis when doing my attendance check in groups and it saves me so much time. I also save and email the report to the teachers of the students in my group on Thursdays so that they can review the data and let me know if there are any corrections. This way I can be sure that I reward students appropriately when they check in on Fridays. It is great for so many uses.