LECTURE ATTENDANCE AND SUCCEE ON GENERAL MATHEMATICS. CASE STUDY OF FIRST-YEAR BUSINESS STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY OF TIRANA, ALBANIA

The lecture remains at the centre of most universities approaches to teaching and learning, despite the emphasis on quality and flexibility, and the introduction of new technologies. But, lecturers increasingly face very low levels of lecture attendance. Concern for improvements in student learning has attracted a large amount of literature in search for the correlation of class attendance and student performance. The majority of these studies show that students attending classes perform better on assessment than those skipping lectures. Class attendance has been shown to be correlated with grades across a wide range of disciplines. The aim of this research is to analyze the business student’s attendance in general mathematics lectures and their final examination success. The population of the study consists of business students attending first-year at the Faculty of Economy, University of Tirana for 2012-2013 academic year. Using the simple random sampling, 143 students are randomly selected and completed a survey during the first week of June. The logistic regression is used to estimate the impact of lecture attendance on final success. The results indicate that lecture attendance of business students has a statistically significant impact on their final success in General Mathematics course. These findings suggest that enhancing student participation should be a crucial aspect of administration, in order to improve performance. At the same time, the lecturer should also create a good learning environment, to motivate students and engage their interest in the course.