An Investigation into the Academic Effectiveness of Class Attendance in an Intermediate Microeconomic Theory Class

Increasing rates of absenteeism from university classrooms raises concern about the consequent effect on student learning. This paper adds to a small but growing body of knowledge from Australia and other countries, about the extent of absenteeism and its effect on academic performance. Panel data on class attendance and academic performance in an intermediate microeconomics class at an Australian University are used to estimate several fixed-effects and random-effects models that explicitly account for unobserved heterogeneity among students. We find strong support for the proposition that class attendance has a significant effect on academic performance.