https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00322-0
Regular Article
Academic failures and co-location social networks in campus
1
School of Statistics and Mathematics, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China
2
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, China
3
Key Laboratory of Complex System Analysis, Management and Decision (Beihang University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China
Received:
23
June
2021
Accepted:
9
February
2022
Published online:
23
February
2022
Social network structures have an additional effect on success other than individual factors. Whether this is true for failure, the opposite of success, still remains unclear. This paper focuses on the associations between academic failures, that defined by not passing course exams, and campus social networks based on students’ co-location occurrences. A novel method with statistical validation is first established to infer co-location social networks reliably from campus behaviors recorded by smart cards. It is found that network structures indicated by degree and clustering are indeed significantly associated with academic failures and failed students usually locate in small, dense but heterogeneous clusters. While their connections are more stable over time, failed students seem to be not positively influenced by those non-failed ones and even demonstrate a failure momentum. In fact, further exploitations imply that failed students have less incentives to adjust their social structures when compared to the non-failed ones. Additionally, we show that messages reflected in co-location social networks and behavioral activities indeed help predict failures and the network snapshot at mid-term offers competent prediction power on individual academic failure such that interventions in pursuit of avoiding failures can be applied within a substantial time window. Our findings underline the importance of understanding co-location social networks beyond failure in educational settings.
Key words: Social network / Co-location network / Academic failure / Clustering / Campus behaviors / Social contagion
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00322-0.
© The Author(s) 2022
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
