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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…

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…

Increasing student retention (successfully finishing a particular course) and persistence (continuing through a sequence of courses or the major area of study) is currently a major challenge for universities. While students' academic and…

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…

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,…

Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics of communication using on-line data, including e-mail…

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…

Networks are powerful instruments to study complex phenomena, but they become hard to analyze in data that contain noise. Network backbones provide a tool to extract the latent structure from noisy networks by pruning non-salient edges. We…

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…

Research shows that community plays a central role in learning, and strong community engages students and aids in student persistence. Thus, understanding the function and structure of communities in learning environments is essential to…

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…

Several approaches to cognition and intelligence research rely on statistics-based models testing, namely factor analysis. In the present work we exploit the emerging dynamical systems perspective putting the focus on the role of the…

We study user behavior in the courses offered by a major Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) provider during the summer of 2013. Since social learning is a key element of scalable education in MOOCs and is done via online discussion forums,…

The large-scale online management systems (e.g. Moodle), online web forums (e.g. Piazza), and online homework systems (e.g. WebAssign) have been widely used in the blended courses recently. Instructors can use these systems to deliver class…

Network analysis is an important tool in understanding the behavior of complex systems of interacting entities. However, due to the limitations of data gathering technologies, some interactions might be missing from the network model. This…

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…

In this paper we discuss a very simple approach of combining content and link information in graph structures for the purpose of community discovery, a fundamental task in network analysis. Our approach hinges on the basic intuition that…

We study functional activity in the human brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and recently developed tools from network science. The data arise from the performance of a simple behavioural motor learning task. Unsupervised…

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…

Networks may, or may not, be wired to have a core that is both itself densely connected and central in terms of graph distance. In this study we propose a coefficient to measure if the network has such a clear-cut core-periphery dichotomy.…