Several studies have documented how poor attendance correlates with lower standardized test scores. Now the people who bring you the National Assessment of Educational Progress have connected absences in the month before the national test with weaker performance.
Diving deeper into the data that NAEP provides, researchers found that nearly 20 percent of the eighth graders who scored at the basic level in reading on the 2011 test had missed three or more days in the previous month. For those who scored below basic, the figure was higher than 25 percent.