An Assessment of Innovative Student Monitoring Attendance System in Nigeria

Abstract

In today's world, a paper based approach is followed for marking attendance, where the students sign on the attendance sheets. This data is then manually entered into the system. Managing the attendance of the students during lectures is a difficult task and it becomes more difficult during the report v phase. This is because the process of marking attendance and maintaining the data is not fully automated and manual computation produces errors and also wastes a lot of time. For this reason, the development of Attendance Monitoring System (AMS) using android platform is proposed. Attendance Monitoring System (AMS), android platform, marking attendance on one click, user authentication, database, report generation, sending SMS.The School Attendance Monitoring System (SAMS) is a system that allows teachers to report enrolment and attendance of pupils by sending a simple SMS to a server. It offers near-real-time monitoring of pupil attendance, at individual or at aggregate level, and can also be used to monitor teachers' attendance.

Three pilot locations were chosen: Kaduna South and Kudan in Kaduna State, and Ibeju-Lekki in Lagos State. The primary objective of the pilot was to test whether Nigeria was ready – both technologically and in terms of stakeholder buy-in – for such an intervention, and to identify potential cross-cutting and location-specific challenges.

Key questions that we sought to answer during the pilot period were: Is there sufficient interest and buy-in at school-level, among teachers and head teachers, to support NSAMS reporting?

• Is there sufficient interest and buy-in among stakeholders and policymakers, at Local Government and State levels, to make use of the data generated by NSAMS?
• What cross-cutting challenges are experienced during the different stages of the pilot (technical development, training, roll-out and data entry) that are specific to the Nigerian context?
• What challenges are experienced during the different stages of the pilot that are specific to the contexts of the different pilot locations (north vs south, urban vs rural)?

 The findings revealed that At LGEA level, the Education Secretaries reportedly been extremely involved in the system, checking the website on a near-daily basis using their personal smart phones, and following up on schools who were not reporting. NSAMS had made the ES aware of specific issues existing in their schools. The Education Secretaries felt that teachers feel a sense of ownership and accountability over the system, with teachers making sure they report accurate data as they understand that LGEA staff are able to cross-check with paper attendance. The findings also revealed that LGEA were using the attendance data to make more accurate estimates of the numbers of examination papers needed, which were previously based on enrolment numbers, leading to wastage. LGEA staff felt that NSAMS had become accepted by teachers as part of their daily routine, and that it was not an extra burden. The attendance is broken down into attending, not attending, no report and attending without being enrolled. It can also be disaggregated by gender. The findings shows that approximately two thirds of enrolled children are attending most days, but around 200 children are unaccounted for on any one day due to no report being submitted. It also revealed there are more enrolled boys than girls not attending school and between 50 and 100 children absent on any one day.