AMS Attendance Monitoring System

ATTENDANCE MONITORING SYSTEM FOR SELECTED SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS WITH AN APPLICATION OF OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM
Carlo M. Reyes
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
8134 Rosario St., Brgy. 8 (4116)
Carmona, Cavite
Contact Number: ([phone] [e-mail] ABSTRACT
In this paper, the researcher makes a solution to easily check the attendance of the students using an automated seat plans with pictures of the students.
It’s a fact that students who attend school regularly learn more and are more successful in school than students who do not. Parents who make regular school attendance a priority also are helping their children learn to accept responsibility, and that’s an important lesson for a successful life. [1]
Attendance patterns are formed early in life. Children who develop good attendance habits in the early grades will be more likely to continue them throughout their school career, as well as into their chosen career. Regular attendance is critically important, because students who miss school miss out on carefully planned sequences of instruction. They miss out on active learning experiences and class participation. They miss out on the opportunity to ask questions. As a result, they are more likely to fall behind, and they are more likely to drop out.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 & K.3.1 [Administrative Data Processing & Computers and Education]: Education & Computer Uses in Education
General Terms
Attendance, Optimization, Algorithm, Educators, Chronic Absenteeism, Solution, Computer, Tool, School, Technological Advancements
Keywords
Drag, Drop, Re-Arrange, Seat Plan, Images, Reports, Log In, Log Out, Print, Automated / Automation, Grid, Section, Schedule, Load, Computer-Based Systems, Monotonous, Tedious
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s rapid technological advancements, traditional procedures in checking, recording and computation of data becomes more and more obsolete. Today manual operations are gradually replaced by systematic procedures which eventually improve one’s productivity. The emerging computer technologies today, a lot of manual processes were automated through computer applications. Automating manual processes saves time, energy and resources. Computer technology has also become an aid in instruction. A lot of computer-based systems nowadays are available for use of educators for classroom and resource management. Also, computers, as a tool, are utilized in order to automate monotonous teaching practices like checking and monitoring of attendance.
Most of the schools even private or public, elementary, high school or even in college all over the Philippines are using a tedious and time consuming monitoring of attendance. Some use attendance sheets, index cards and others require students to submit a sheet of paper with their names and section written there on a sheet of paper. One convenient method especially in large classes is to have a seat plan to easily check vacant seats and match to the assigned students. After collecting the data, all these methods would still require encoding of information gathered to come up with an attendance report.
Students need to attend school daily to succeed. The good news of this research is that being in school leads to succeeding in school. Achievement, especially in math, is very sensitive to attendance, and absence of even two weeks during one school year matters. Attendance also strongly affects standardized test scores and graduation and dropout rates. Educators and policymakers cannot truly understand achievement gaps or efforts to close them without considering chronic absenteeism.
Chronic absenteeism is not the same as truancy or average daily attendance – the attendance rate schools use for state report cards and federal accountability. Chronic absenteeism means missing 10 percent of a school year for any reason. A school can have average daily attendance of 90 percent and still have 40 percent of its students chronically absent, because on different days, different students make up that 90 percent. [1]
That’s why the researcher developed a system called AMS or Attendance Monitoring System that will automate this process. This system should have user-friendly interface that even users with just basic computer knowledge would be able to use it without any problem. It should not have a stiff learning curve that even an ordinary teacher can easily understand how to use it. This system will help teachers to easily monitor the attendance which is really important in evaluating the grades of the students.
2. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Specifically, the researcher will answer the following questions:
2.1 Student’s chronic-absenteeism
Chronic absenteeism is most prevalent among low-income students. Gender and ethnic background do not appear to play a role in this aspect. The youngest and the oldest students tend to have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, with students attending most regularly in third through fifth grades.

2.2 Teacher’s absences that might affect the students’ progress

Teacher absences may also negatively impact student achievement in less direct ways. For example, teacher absences may inhibit attempts by school faculties to implement consistent instructional practices across classrooms and grades. Common planning time, during which teachers may collaborate on improving instruction, is often so scarce that even low rates of teacher absence could almost completely undermine its purpose. Note that this mechanism implies that a teacher’s absence not only impacts negatively on the students he or she directly works with, but also on the students taught by the teacher’s colleagues. [2]

2.3 Student’s seating arrangement/organization
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2.4 Manual counting and tallying the total number of absences
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2.5 Handwritten reports every grading quarter
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3. STATEMENT OF RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The computer is used to assist man in business organizations, in research and in other walks of life. Some of these areas are examined so as to give an indication of very wide range of activities in which the computer is involved: Some of the applicant may be surprising, if one considers the limited capabilities of the machine. However, versatility has been provided by man’s ability to reduce what are often highly complicated problems to the simple level at which the computer can be used, and to design and implement ingenious computer systems which can provide a myriad interplay of basically simple tasks that the computer can handle. Whatever has been achieved soon has been accomplished in a very short period of time. The first computer was developed as little as forty-five years ago and ten years passed before the industry was established on a firm footing. [3]
The learning process can be enriched in many subjects because of the scale and range of information which a computer data bank can provide. Use is increasingly being made of the computer as a resource in teaching and learning at all levels of education. Computer programs such as AMS or Attendance Monitoring System will play a vital role as an educational tool to improve the students’ punctuality and avoid absenteeism. Also, this computer application will help the teachers or educators to maintain everyday checking and monitoring the attendance of the students.
The AMS Attendance Monitoring System aims to:

3.1 Minimize efforts of teachers in monitoring the attendance
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3.2 Maintain the daily records of attendance
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3.3 Automatic generation of reports
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3.4 To provide a detailed auditing of each processor’s work
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3.5 Gather the students’ basic information
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3.6 Monitor the Teacher’s attendance for arrival and departure
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3.7 Captures pictures of students and teachers as a reference
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4. PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH
As the usual classroom setting, the teacher is the one who is authorized to check or monitor the attendance. The teacher and the system administrator (the researcher) play a vital role in response with monitoring and checking (for the teacher or the school administrator) and maintaining (for the system administrator) the attendance.
The significance of the study is to develop a system that will help the local in monitoring the attendance of the teachers. The proponent came up with the system to improve the manual recording of attendance, the attendance monitoring system propose by the proponent will record the attendance based on time and date.
5. BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
5.1 Opportunity System
It is a fact that collecting daily class attendance is a must since it’s a part of the student’s grade. The students’ progression would be the reason why teachers are required to take it at the beginning of the class, but the manual system that schools normally use to take attendance is tedious and somewhat redundant since after getting the data, teacher would still need to encode it to the system that the school is currently using.
With these problems, the project team had come up with an automated Attendance Monitoring System which would make it easier for the teachers to check attendance and just directly transfer the data to the system.
5.2 Vision Statement
The automated Attendance Monitoring System would benefit both public and private schools as it could provide the teachers an interface for managing attendance data for every class that would be directly connected to the system.
Through computerization, the school can do their task easier compared to a manual process of taking daily attendance which in turns becomes tedious in their part. This study aims to test its functionality in terms of speed, accuracy, data handling, security, stability and adaptability in taking class attendance.
Therefore, the researchers intend to develop an automated attendance monitoring system that will help teachers to manage attendance for the classes they have. The software is advanced, efficient, reliable and dependable in organizing the attendance. The application software will be managed by the school administrator, the only one capable of adding and or altering account for the teachers, while the teacher would have an access that would enable them to manage attendance for the classes enlisted to them. The proposed software will solve the existing problem encountered in the existing system.

2.3 Critical Success Factors

Factors that may affect the success of the system projects are the following:

5.3.1 Hardware resources needed

One main constraint is the hardware resources needed to implement the system. The classroom/ laboratory in-charge will be able to set up the computers for every room needed for encoding the data and at the same, the main server which serves as the repository and back-up for data.

5.3.2 Software resources and peripherals

Another constraint is the software resources. The classroom/ laboratory in-charge has a responsibility of changing the software intended for each semester or year. The project team is considering this constraint to be one of the problems that may arise while the system may be implemented. The system will run only on a specific programming language and has an issue of portability.

3. PROJECT DESCRIPTION

6.1 Scope

The proposed system is a network based system in which the data transactions will be created and distributed to all computers connected to the server. The primary users or the administrator would have tools that can manipulate and create class and student data that would only be available on their end.
The system is secured by integrating user’s login which allows the access of the entire system through primary users account and the viewing classes intended for the secondary users. On the other hand, the proposed system will consider the following features and functions:

6.1.1 In-Scope

Log-In/Out Maintenance – enables the users to access the system depending on the type of account the user has. Log-out menu enables the users to exit or close the application.
Users Maintenance – allows the user to add, edit, update and delete certain username and password. This menu could only be accessed with an administrator’s account.
Backup Utilities – enables the administrator account to back-up all data of class attendance and it will help the administrator save the system together with the database in another storage location for security purposes.
Time Maintenance – time menu enables the administrator account to assign an interval time for the class schedule. Example 7:30 -9:00
Account Maintenance – enables the administrator account to add or edit accounts on the system.
Class Maintenance – a list of all the class a teacher handles. The Administrator can add a subject depending on the contents of the prospectus.
Year Maintenance – enables the administrator account to add curricular levels.
Student Maintenance – enables the Administrator to add or remove student to a specific class. As well as provide a list for the students enrolled to the class.
Day Maintenance – enables the administrator to place a day interval.

Attendance Maintenance – provide listed report of the attendance for a class or for a specific student available to be printed and viewed both by the Administrator and the teacher.
Schedule Settings – enables the administrator account to assign room, faculty, subjects, day, year and time for the class schedule.

Log-off – enables the user’s account to close all application of the Attendance Monitoring System.

4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
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5. REFERENCES
[1] Mark Campbell (2009): The Importance of Regular School Attendance.
[2] Miller, Raegen T., Murnane, Richard J., Willett John B. (2007): Do Teacher Absences Impact Student Achievement? Longitudinal Evidence from One Urban School District. Pg.
[3] Nagpal, D. P., (1991): Computer Fundamentals, pg. 460, 472 and 476

References: [1] Mark Campbell (2009): The Importance of Regular School Attendance. [2] Miller, Raegen T., Murnane, Richard J., Willett John B. (2007): Do Teacher Absences Impact Student Achievement? Longitudinal Evidence from One Urban School District. Pg. [3] Nagpal, D. P., (1991): Computer Fundamentals, pg. 460, 472 and 476