Objectives: 

The absenteeism in the university classrooms is a stated daily fact that makes difficult the suitable formation of students, diminishes its individual success possibilities, and obstructs the suitable formative progress of the whole collective class-group. The aim of the present work was to identify the factors and causes that lead and explain the absenteeism of students in the Faculty of Biology as an object of study.

Materials: 

The study was carried out in three classroom groups of students pertaining to the courses "Applied Ethology" (election-free course of Biology's degree), "Endocrinology" (election-free course of Biochemistry's degree), and "Animal Physiology" (obligatory course for both degrees). A quantitative analysis of academic results obtained from all of the students compared with respect to their classroom attendance was made by means of SPSS v.15 and Excel 2007 statistical software, with significance set at p<0.05.

Results: 

The analysis of the obtained results has shown statistically significant differences between the academic performance among the students that attend regularly to their lectures and those absentees, implying that attendance has a great impact on their academic success.

Conclusions: 

These data may be useful to improve the degrees obtained by university students and the level of involvement of this group of students, as well as implementing strategies to prevent their absenteeism, articulated at three levels: Coaching and mentoring, group support, and reinforcement actions with educational failure' students.