Q&A with Washington State University researchers on assessing chronic absenteeism and truancy in schools
The number of students who regularly miss school has caused a truancy crisis across the country. The pandemic definitely inflamed the problem, but it hasn’t eased much in recent years. Chronic absenteeism—defined differently across the states but generally means regularly missing a lot of classes—significantly affects Washington state too.
To get some insight into chronic absenteeism, Washington State Magazine talked to four experts from Washington State University:
- Brian French: Berry Family Distinguished and Regents Professor, College of Education, WSU Pullman
- Paul Strand: Professor, psychology, WSU Tri-Cities
- Thao Vo (’15 Psych., ’19 MA, ’24 PhD Ed. Psych.): WARNS team and Center for Measurement Justice
- Chad Gotch (’12 PhD Ed. Psych.): Associate professor, educational psychology, WSU Pullman
They work on Washington Assessment of the Risks and Needs of Students (WARNS), an assessment tool used in about half of Washington state school districts, as well as a few other states. WARNS is a short, self-report measure for 11 to 18-year-old middle and high school youth. It’s designed to allow schools, courts, and youth service providers assess individual risks and needs that may lead to truancy or school failure, and to target interventions accordingly.
Read more about WARNS and WSU’s work in the Fall 2024 issue.
How big of a problem is chronic absenteeism in our schools?
French:
In Washington state, we have about 1.2 million students in our K-12 school system, and about 80,000 to 100,000 students end up being absent or truant for a good chunk of time. By state law, schools have to have some assessment system in place or a plan to get them re-engaged.
We’re kind of tying it to both mental health issues as well as school engagement issues, and trying to get a sense around the different counties in the state. I don’t think there’s a really good understanding of all that’s happening, especially for the rural populations where resources might be lower. So, we’re starting to do some work and think about that the disproportionate component of it.
Vo:
Many post-COVID students were not even returning from online or virtual learning. I think it put a lot of the students who are already struggling even more at risk. The national attention on absenteeism has increased in the last year. With WARNS we’ve been very, very vigilant and engaged with the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) and in conversations on how to get students back to school.
Washington is among the highest percentages of students who are chronically absent nationwide. Even pre-pandemic, it was an issue that we were very concerned with, as were parents, school staff, and administrators.
Strand:
We really try to identify reasons why kids haven’t come back to school. We don’t even know where they are; we don’t know why they’re not here. And we’re not doing a great job of being able to track them either.
As truancy increases, we see the performance level of kids on standardized testing has gone down. That’s a great indication of how important it is to go to school. It’s going to be very challenging to get kids to go back to school. Kids and families don’t make life decisions based on their test scores. They go to school because they want to graduate.
Gotch:
We might tend to think of school attendance as this binary thing. Like you’re either in school and doing school, or you’re not coming to school. But what we learned was that there are a lot of variations. Especially post-pandemic, kids come to school but are not coming to class. So, they’re coming for social connection. Sometimes they’re coming for food.
This is part of my other work with student assessment. We’re seeing stronger patterns of disengagement in what used to be routine kinds of things in the class.
What is WARNS? How does it help address chronic absenteeism?
Strand:
It’s a quick, 40-question screener based on life course criminology theory. It measures six areas critical to healthy social, emotional, and educational development: aggression-defiance, depression-anxiety, substance use, peer deviance, school engagement, and family environment.
Originally WARNS was designed to identify ways to improve outcomes for youth, not in schools so much, but in the in the juvenile court system. It was developed by a psychologist named Tom George, who at the time was working for the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts.
About 120 school districts use it in Washington state, and we also have some districts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia. There are other assessment tools for absenteeism, but they are much longer.
Kids can complete it online, and then immediately the scores will be generated so that both the kid and the counselor can review those scores right there.
French:
Our goal with WARNS is really to make it as user-friendly for the districts and the students. We want to make it so they can actually use WARNS in a way that’s helpful for them.
We started essentially trying to build a really good argument for the use of the scores. And so part of that argument is, how well does it work for different groups of people? Can we show that the items and the scores appear to have meaning they want, regardless of the background you’re coming from?
How do school personnel and others use WARNS to help students?
Vo:
I started in 2018 on the WARNS team training new users. We were working with school psychologists, leadership, administration, counselors, people like that who work closely with students and are really concerned about attendance. I learned there’s so much more to it when we talk about how these systems should serve school administrators. We can really lean on their expertise, like the relationship with students and how assessments can help them gather more information to support these students.
On my master’s thesis, I started to ask how different contextual information might influence how students in certain districts respond to the items on the WARNS assessment. After my master’s and for my doctoral dissertation, I started asking qualitative questions, like “how are these WARNS assessments embedded in everyday practices for a high school teacher, or a librarian who’s supposed to oversee students who are disengaged in at school?”
I really worked hard with different school districts to build relationships, because that’s the number one key thing when you’re working with communities. I worked with three different districts for a year and a half or so. We put together these models of use to communicate where WARNS is embedded in their practices and their school policies and procedures. Schools can exchange their models of use. They can ask, “That school is doing it this way. Well, I hadn’t thought about that. What about our school? Could we do something like that? Is it appropriate?”
Gotch:
Schools will have a student take the WARNS to get the score and have indications of where the student has maybe high areas of risk or need. But they may not be sure what to do next. We need to look at ways that the WARNS can be a springboard towards helping the student. We can break away from the traditional “Here’s your score. It’s high or low.”
We’re pairing WARNS with vignettes, essentially short stories that are kind of everyday manifestations, where the central character exhibits those areas that the WARNS is asking about. The school personnel and students can share a story together.
These are short, 300-500 words, and we went to younger folks to create them. We knew that if we tried to write these things, it’d be like the old after-school specials, melodramatic and out of touch. We needed people who are closer to the lived experiences of the students.
The stories also must be appropriate and effective. These conversations can be delicate, and they can be a bit dangerous. They can be traumatizing, which is something that we learned from counselors.
The WARNS is an opportunity to connect a student with an adult who cares. And we know that can be powerful.
French:
We have different users and different systems. Some families get involved and we’ve seen WARNS used in community engagement boards. When I get these little snapshots of how WARNS is being used, it’s really cool.
No measurement is ever perfect. A score is one point of information that should be used in conversations and interventions, along with all the other information that the counselor or teacher or the principal has from working with that student. We’ve heard stories where people say the child took the assessment, they looked at the items, and after the fact they say, “Oh, can I take it again? I wasn’t truthful on that.”
What’s the response of schools and students to the WARNS assessment?
Strand:
The students get their six scores plus a total score. And that’s nice, because they’re color coded to indicate whether they’re at risk in that area or have a low risk.
The student who takes the test can say, “Oh, look at that, why do I have a red right there?”
The tool is really designed to be the impetus for a counselor to have conversations with the kid, to open them up, if you will. These kids, they’re not trusting of the system, oftentimes for good reason. And so, if they get some feedback on themselves and they feel like that feedback is accurate, then all of a sudden that makes them feel like, “Hey, this is a way in which I’ve contributed to the system where otherwise I oftentimes feel like I’m just taken advantage of.”
French:
The idea of people taking tests to assess themselves is also appealing to just about everybody. You know, it’s the reason magazines have those “find out what Star Wars character you are” quizzes.
Vo:
Through all these conversations, interventions, and commitment plans, they’re really trying to stress again this emphasis on mental health supports for youth—tailored to their specific needs—in addition to reengagement, strengthening teacher-student relationships, and so forth. In addition to the sort of practices for school administrators, they want to empower the youth to take control of their future.
There’s this cultural shift in what one school is specifically doing, which is trying to increase this idea of students connecting, building, and envisioning a future for themselves. Students feel internally motivated in some ways to change their outlook on why school isn’t working for them, or why they’re not coming to school. We want schools to reduce stigma around absenteeism and truancy. But we also want to have an impact on our youth.
What do schools and people who work with the students think of WARNS?
French:
We have good response rates in our surveys about WARNS because we have connections with our users. I think they know we’re here for them and so they’re willing to give us back information to keep improving the system. We also try to minimize costs to the district because we don’t want that to be a barrier for giving information to kids.
We try to respond in less than 24 hours to user issues. We always want feedback from schools and other WARNS users.
Vo:
We heard from a couple of our districts that there were some cultural and linguistic barriers. There were some ethnically and racially diverse students who needed to take the WARNS and couldn’t because English isn’t their native language. Even though we’ve translated the assessment completely into Spanish, there were other languages that fall short. I think that culturally raises some questions, because you’re not only translating the words, but also do the cultural practices of certain groups even think of risks this way? We really had to think carefully about how to advise those cases.
What is the future of WARNS? What changes are you making and how do you want to see it evolve?
Vo:
I feel like in our world and education, not very many people think about absenteeism as tied to mental health or so much stigma, which my research has communicated around absenteeism. And we’re just scratching the surface with WARNS.
French:
We hear a need for a shorter screening measure, so we’ve done some initial work looking at a computer adaptive version of WARNS. It’s now about 40 to 50 items and you might be able to get a sense of what’s going on in the student’s life through maybe 13 items. How do we leverage that type of adaptive system on the computer to make a shorter screener for some of our bigger districts?
We’re also looking at an elementary school version. We know there are issues going on here, but it’s complicated. At the middle school and high school, the students are taking the assessments and self-reporting. That’s fine through sixth grade, but some questions won’t make sense for younger students. They’re going to look and feel very different at elementary level, and I think that parents have to be involved.
At the end of the day, though, this is all about having really engaged with students.
All photos courtesy respective WSU departments.