Purpose of the Guide
The AttendNC Research Guide helps educators, families, and community partners turn attendance research into practical guidance. Instead of sorting through long studies or comparing reports on your own, you can use it to quickly understand what research suggests, compare strategies, and think through next steps.
It is designed with North Carolina K-12 schools in mind. The guide uses North Carolina terminology and is intended to respond in ways that are relevant to local school, district, and state contexts.
The guide can help users:
- compare attendance strategies
- identify practical considerations for implementation
- draft discussion points for a team
- align tiered interventions with local context
- turn research into action steps for school or district planning
The intent is to support school leaders, district staff, student support teams, family engagement teams, and others who are trying to move from evidence to action.
How to Use It Well
The best place to start is with a clear question. Users might ask about a particular strategy, a planning challenge, or a type of support they want to better understand. More focused questions usually lead to more useful responses.
For example, users might ask:
- What are effective Tier II supports for students with emerging attendance risk?
- Compare home visits, caregiver texting, and mentoring for middle schools.
- Summarize this report and tell me what a district attendance team should do next.
- What does research suggest about building stronger attendance teams?
- Help me draft parent communication templates for principals and teachers.
The guide also works best as a conversation. Users do not need to fit everything into one prompt. After an initial response, they can ask follow-up questions to narrow the focus, request a shorter version, compare options, or tailor guidance for a different audience.
It can also be useful in team settings. The guide can help prepare for meetings, organize ideas before a discussion, or generate a starting point for agendas, discussion questions, or action planning.
Upload Documents to Add Local Context
One of the most useful features of the guide is the ability to upload documents. Users can upload district attendance plans, school improvement materials, reports, presentations, or other written resources they want the guide to use.
When documents are uploaded, the guide can summarize them, compare them, identify key themes, and translate them into practical planning guidance. This helps connect broader attendance research to the specific materials and priorities users are already working with.
Use caution when uploading documents. Uploaded materials shape the guide's response for that conversation. If a document is outdated, incomplete, locally specific, or still in draft form, the response may reflect those limitations. Please do NOT upload or paste sensitive, confidential, or personally identifiable information, especially information about students or staff. This includes student records, staff records, confidential case materials, and other internal-only documents. Upload only the minimum information needed for the task.
Responses may also reflect the wording of the prompt and the materials provided, so outputs should be reviewed carefully. Important questions related to policy, compliance, accountability, or data privacy should still be confirmed through official sources and local procedures when needed.
Use Your Judgment, Don’t Replace It
The AttendNC Research Guide is meant to support planning, discussion, and decision-making. It does not replace professional judgment, local knowledge, or official policy guidance and should not be used on its own to make decisions about individual students, services, discipline, or other actions that could affect rights, opportunities, or access to support.
For questions related to formal state requirements, accountability rules, district procedures, or compliance expectations, users should still confirm information through official sources.
NCDPI has also published Generative AI Implementation Recommendations and Considerations for PK-13 Public Schools, which provides broader guidance for responsible AI use in North Carolina public schools.
How the Guide Works
The AttendNC Research Guide is built in ChatGPT and tailored specifically to help users understand research on chronic absenteeism and apply it in practical ways. Custom GPTs like this one are set up with specific instructions, source materials, and selected capabilities so they respond in more focused ways. This guide is configured to emphasize clear language, practical guidance, and attendance-related resources.
Grounded in Trusted Sources
The AttendNC Research Guide is grounded in both North Carolina-specific materials and broader attendance research. For North Carolina context, it draws on materials such as the North Carolina School Attendance and Student Accounting Manual, which helps anchor key terms and definitions in official state guidance.
The guide also uses practitioner-facing resources such as Attendance Playbook: Smart Strategies for Reducing Student Absenteeism Post-Pandemic and Attendance Work’s A Guide to Using the Attendance Playbook, which help schools and districts think through tiered strategies and implementation choices. These resources are especially helpful for thinking through tiered supports, implementation choices, and how to match strategies to local needs.
In addition, the guide draws on broader implementation studies and evidence reviews, including AttendNC Count’s Chronic Absenteeism: A Review of the Research, Benchmarking Supportive Attendance Practices, and Addressing Chronic Absenteeism in Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Evidence-Based Interventions, which reviews the strength and limits of the current intervention evidence.
How the Guide Handles Evidence
Not every attendance strategy has the same level of evidence behind it. Some approaches are backed by stronger research, while others are promising but still developing.
The guide may point to strategies that have mixed results in the research or that depend heavily on implementation and context. In those cases, it may suggest piloting an idea, combining strategies, or using caution before making major changes. When the evidence is mixed or limited, the guide is designed to say so clearly.
Research should be used as a starting point for thoughtful planning, not as a final answer. Users should also review responses for possible bias, overgeneralization, stigmatizing language, or accessibility issues, especially when interpreting attendance patterns across student groups, families, or communities.
AttendNC Counts
The AttendNC Research Guide is one part of the broader AttendNC Counts effort led by NCDPI's Office of Research and Promising Practices. AttendNC Counts brings together research, promising practices, communications, and practical tools to help schools, districts, families, and partners better understand chronic absenteeism and respond more effectively.
In addition to the research guide, AttendNC Counts highlights Bright Spots, shares practical resources, and supports statewide learning about what is helping students attend more regularly. Explore the main AttendNC Counts page to learn more about the larger initiative and related resources.
