Related papers: Students' network integration as a predictor of pe…
Increasing student retention and persistence -- in particular classes or in their major area of study -- is a challenge for universities. Students' academic and social integration into an institution seems to be vital for student retention,…
Theories developed by Tinto and Nora identify academic performance, learning gains, and involvement in learning communities as significant facets of student engagement that, in turn, support student persistence. Collaborative learning…
Developing a sense of community among students is one of the three pillars of an overall reform effort to increase participation in physics, and the sciences more broadly, at Florida International University. The emergence of a research and…
The lack of an engaging pedagogy and the highly competitive atmosphere in introductory science courses tend to discourage students from pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Once in a STEM field, academic…
The Modeling Instruction (MI) approach to introductory physics manifests significant increases in student conceptual understanding and attitudes toward physics. In light of these findings, we investigated changes in student self-efficacy…
Community-based professional development initiatives have been shown to support physics faculty in their adoption of research-based instructional strategies. Hoping to better understand these initiatives' mechanisms of success, we analyze…
Student-to-student interactions are foundational to many active learning environments, but are most often studied using qualitative methods. Network analysis tools provide a quantitative complement to this picture, allowing researchers to…
For more than 20 years, social network analysis of student collaboration networks has focused on a student's centrality to predict academic performance. And even though a growing amount of sociological literature has supported that academic…
From industry to government to academia, attracting and retaining science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors is recognized as a key element of the 21$^{\text{st}}$ century knowledge economy. The ability to retain students…
Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between…
Empirical data on early network history are rare. Students beginning their studies at a university with no or few prior connections to each other offer a unique opportunity to investigate the formation and early development of social…
We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between…
Motivation is essential in the learning process of university students, and teachers should have a wide range of strategies to address this issue. The emergence of social technologies has had a considerable influence in e-learning systems,…
There are various teaching methods developed in order to attain successful delivery of a subject without prior knowledge of the interaction among the students in a class. Social network analysis can be used to identify individual,…
The application of social network analysis (SNA) has recently grown prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education research. Research on classroom networks has led to greater understandings of student persistence…
Student persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has long been a focus of educational research, with both quantitative and qualitative methods being used to investigate patterns and mechanisms of attrition.…
This study uses social network analysis and the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) to characterize six research-based introductory physics curricula. Peer Instruction, Modeling Instruction, ISLE, SCALE-UP,…
Discussion forums provide a channel for students to engage with peers and course material outside of class, accessible even to commuter and non-traditional populations. As such, forums can build classroom community as well as aid learning,…
Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and…
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement…