Correlates of students´ attendance to class, participation and performances in engineering modules

A number of studies have examined the concern about students´ absenteeism in the tertiary institutions, but very little appears to have been done on engineering education in the Caribbean. This paper presents the findings of a study carried out which examined the correlates of students´ attendance, participation and performances in tertiary engineering education module with the view to determine the relationships between attendance, participation and performance. The sample of the study consisted of 24 students enrolled in Engineering Statics of the Bachelor of Engineering programme. The instruments used to collect data were students´ attendance and performance records, and observations. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and p-value summary. The findings of the study showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between students´ attendance, participation and performance in class. The relationship between attendance and performance was shown to have a correlation coefficient of 0.656 while the relationship between participation and performance was 0.587.