When you view Attendance statistics, Arbor often defaults to showing attendance as a percentage. However, you may want to view the number of sessions a student was absent, late or present instead, for example. This guide shows you how to do this in the Custom Report Writer and on the out-of-the-box Attendance Statistics page.
In the Custom Report Writer
Checking you have the right report focus.
Many custom reports can include Attendance columns. However, this depends on the report focus you choose; for example, a report with the focus of Staff does not have attendance columns available, but a report about Students does. You can see all report focuses and the columns you can add to them in these guides: Fields and Filters by Report Focus.
Changing your column formats
Once you're sure you have the right type of report, you can add an Attendance column to the report. More on adding columns can be found here: Creating reports from scratch - Step 3 - Select Columns.
When you add or edit an attendace column, you see the Format dropdown; this dropdown lets you change the column output from a percentage to a number.
The options are:
- Statistic - This outputs the attendace as a percentage
- Numerator - This outputs the actual number of sessions a student received the mark
- Denominator - The total possible number of sessions the students could have received a mark
These three relate to each other: the Statistic is derived by dividing the Numerator by the Denominator, then multiplying that by 100%.
Summary: to change the format of a percentage to the Sessions that statistic is made of (e.g. the number of times a student was late), set the column format of an attendance column in the report writer to Numerator (Raw Number).
A note on Sessions versus Days
As attendance percentages are calculated on a per-mark basis, not per day, there is no direct way to convert the raw number of sessions to days; to achieve an estimate of days, you need to add a calculated field so you can divide the raw number of sessions by the number of possible sessions per day.
For statutory/roll call attendance, the number of sessions per day is always 2 (AM and PM). For lesson attendance, the possible number of sessions is the number of registers a student is included in on a given day, which might vary from day to day. For this reason, we recommend only using this method if:
- You are looking at the roll call attendance
- If you do want to look at lesson attendace, you are confident that the number registers a student is on each day stays the same (for example, you have 6 periods in a day, and students are on a unique register for each period)
To add the calculated field:
- Make sure you have added your attendance column with the Format "Numerator"
- Add an Advanced Calculation/Formula Column to your report
-
Add your formula:
= [attendance column] / [number of possible sessions per day]
- Set the data type to Integer
- Click Save
This adds a column with an estimate of the number of days the number of sessions equate to. This does not represent full or continuous days.
On the Attendance Statistics page
The Students > Attendance > Statistics page is another commonly used attendance page that defaults to percentages rather than the number of marks or sessions.
To change the format of the columns on this page, you can add columns starting with the word Number by clicking the filter at the top of the page and then clicking Apply. More on changing these filters here: Viewing statistics for attendance
Examples of columns you might add:
- Number Possible - the total marks that are being counted when a student's attendance is calculated
- Number Marks Present - the total number of present marks that are counted in the Present statistic
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Number of Each Mark - columns for a breakdown of each mark that has been issued as a raw number, not a statistic
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