Researchers have found that academic performance may be influenced by the kind of social network a student has.
In a study published in Educational Studies, Maria Yudkevich and colleagues Dilara Valeyeva and Sofia Dokuka showed that students have the tendency to perform better when they are surrounded by high-performing friends, as some individuals have the ability to encourage others to aspire for more and do better.
Most sociologists recognize four factors that affect academic performance in students. These include socioeconomic status; time spent preparing for classes and independent learning; hours allotted to practicing a hobby or working at a job; and academic environment.
However, the latest empirical studies have found that the role social environment plays in academic performance may have been underestimated. Classmates can greatly affect the academic success and behavior of a person.
Still, these studies are not taken seriously because they possess some design flaws. For instance, one can assume that an individual has a static position in their social network or consider a random gathering of classmates as a social network.
For this study, the researchers used social network data from 117 first-year students at a Russian university's Faculty of Economics from 2013 to 2014. They then examined the kind of academic performance a student had, evaluating if academic success was a factor in how the subjects chose who among their classmates became their friends and whether groups of friends influenced how well one did academically.
With help from stochastic actor-based modeling to take care of nuances and dynamics in a social group, Yudkevich, Valeyeva and Dokuka analyzed the data they gathered and found that academic performance was not usually a criterion for choosing friends. However, over time, typically in the middle of an academic year, members of a social group developed a tendency of performing along the same general level.
As such, those who were part of a group of high achievers gradually improved their performance, while those who became friends with underachievers eventually saw their grades slip.
According to the researchers, underachievers have stronger influence on the social networks they belong to, but high achievers have the tendency to grow more popular, eventually expanding their influence. They also discovered that men generally had larger social networks than women did, and all students were more likely to be friends with people they had known before, members of their study group, or people of the same gender.
Photo: Mike Goren | Flickr
