Avenue Scholars Foundation: The Number of Hours Employed and Attendance in High School

The broad social problem being addressed by Avenue Scholars Foundation and this research is at-risk students. Atrisk students are those who have more of a challenge to succeed in their education or work and have a higher chance of being absent from classes and even dropping out (Gemici & Rojewski, 2010). Absenteeism is a problem in the Omaha area with 5,000 students absent from classes each day and 1,000 students being reported for truancy (Avenue Scholars Foundation, 2012). This post-test research design, which would be exhibited in a poster presentation, tried to determine if the amount of hours a student was employed had any relationship with the attendance rate of the student; the hypothesis was that there would be a relationship. High school senior attendance data was taken after the Avenue Scholars program and employment hours was taken from a summer survey students filled out. Although Avenue Scholars does seek to influence employment hours, in the summer survey students self-reported their hours, which the program had no control over, thus it was used as the independent variable. Both an ANOVA and a chi-square test were performed to establish if a relationship existed. Both tests produced no statistical significance, yet did not fail to establish important discoveries. Due to the small sample size and the other external factors influencing the results, such as inconsistent attendance data, the findings should not be ignored. Especially when statistical significance was produced when an additional ANOVA test was run, using a spring survey