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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…
In this paper, we present a unique collection of four data sets to study social behaviour. The data were collected at four international scientific conferences, during which we measured face-to-face contacts along with additional…
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 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…
In this study, we explored the extent to which problems and instructional strategies affect social cohesion and interactions for information seeking in physics classrooms. Three sections of a mechanics physics course taught at a Chilean…
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…
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…
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,…
Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Yet, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions occur under conditions that favor commitment,…
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…
The role of student experiences in physics beyond the classroom which support their development has been the subject of exciting research in recent years. Results, typically from small studies at single institutions, have illustrated that…
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,…
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…
Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor…
The weight of links in a network is often related to the similarity of the nodes. Here, we introduce a simple tunable measure for analysing the similarity of nodes across different link weights. In particular, we use the measure to analyze…
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 physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
We study the structure of social networks of students by examining the graphs of Facebook "friendships" at five American universities at a single point in time. We investigate each single-institution network's community structure and employ…
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…