COMPARISON OF STUDENT ATTENDANCE RATES AND ANALYSIS OF THEIR IMPACTS ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: BLENDED LECTURES (ONLINE PLUS OFFLINE) VS PURELY OFFLINE LECTURES

This paper empirically compares, for the same series of courses, the student attendance rates in blended lectures (i.e., comprising on-and-off online and offline lectures) and those in purely offline lectures and analyzes the impact of such student attendance rates on students’ academic performance and such impact’s moderation by the blended versus purely offline paradigms. Two samples respectively of blended lecture attendance rates together with academic performance from the academic year 2022/2023 (n = 78) and purely offline lecture attendance rates together with academic performance from 2023/2024 (n = 83) were collected from students at the authors’ university in Chinese-culture-oriented Macao, both samples covering the same series of four senior undergraduate courses in disciplines ranging from software engineering to management. Students’ academic performance in a course was appraised by their final examination scores or their coursework scores, depending on whether the course concerned included any final examination. It was found with statistical significance that the mean overall attendance rate (covering both online and offline lectures) in the blended lectures was higher than that in the purely offline lectures (p < 0.05), the mean attendance rates in both the online and offline lectures out of the blended lectures were respectively higher than those in the comparable lectures out of the purely offline lectures (p < 0.01 and p < 0.05 respectively), a high overall attendance rate for a student was associated with his/her good academic performance (p < 0.01), and this association was stronger in the case of purely offline lectures than blended lectures (p < 0.05), at least among students in Chinese-culture-oriented Macao. These findings offer guidance to universities, educators and students on the benefits of blended lectures.