778
Views
12
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

The School Situation for Students with a High Level of Absenteeism in Compulsory School: Is There a Pattern in Documented Support?

&
 

This paper is a retrospective descriptive content analysis of all identified school documents for 90 ninth-grade students with a history of truancy, collected from two Swedish compulsory schools. The study investigates individual, school, and psychosocial factors in the documents and three analyses are presented: (1) a general analysis of the documents, (2) a comparison of truant students with and without learning difficulties (LD), and (3) a comparison between students with LD who received no special educational support and those who did receive support. Predictors for truancy were credits in the fall of the eighth grade, difficulties in mathematics, and relationship problems. For 50% of the students, frequent truancy first became evident after the seventh grade. No connections were found between documented educational and social support, learning difficulties, and level of truancy.