Perception of absenteeism among secondary school students in Tangkak, Johor / Nur Adlina Syazwani Remy Azrul, Nur Haziera Bahar and Siti Nur Afifahalin Mohd Jainuddin

Student attendance is crucial, and absenteeism is a prevalent feature in schools. A few variables have been reported in this analysis, which are personal gender characteristics with absence, school environment, family characteristics problems, the behavior of students, and health problems. Students absenteeism not conducted by many researchers in Malaysia and the officers in Pejabat Pendidikan Daerah Tangkak reported that the student’s attendance decline from 92% to 85% in January 2020 until October 2020. This research aims to examine the perception of absenteeism among secondary school students in Tangkak, Johor. At the secondary educational level, numerous factors have an impact on students’ performance. In this research, the factors included are gender, school environment, family problems, student’s attitude, and health problems of the students. Next, the study focused on secondary school students in the district of Tangkak, Johor and the data derived from actual data. Five hundred and eighty (580) students participated in the study. This study using primary data where the data collected involves two schools which are schools in urban (SMK Ledang) and rural (SMK Tengku Mahmud Iskandar) areas. In the pandemic of COVID-19, there is restriction in order to gather evidence by self-administered, and the online survey has been used as a data collection method. In addition, the pilot testing has been conducted by the researcher before the actual survey has been done. This study used the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro Wilk test to examine the normality of the data. The results of multiple linear regression show that the most significant factors that influence perception of students absenteeism is school environment. Lastly, this study also found that there is a significant difference in perception of absenteeism between students’ gender (male and female) and there is no significant difference in perception of absenteeism between area (rural and urban) of the schools by using Independent T-test.