The Weakness of Weak Ties in the Classroom

TL;DR

This study analyzes college student interactions, revealing that high-performing students tend to form stable, structured groups with similar peers, while low performers engage in transient, disassortative interactions, challenging the positive view of social diversity.

Contribution

It provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of student interaction networks and their relation to academic performance, highlighting the negative correlation between social diversity and achievement.

Findings

High-performing students form stable, similar-peer groups.

Social diversity negatively correlates with academic performance.

Low performers engage in transient, disassortative interactions.

Abstract

Granovetter's "strength of weak ties" hypothesizes that isolated social ties offer limited access to external prospects, while heterogeneous social ties diversify one's opportunities. We analyze the most complete record of college student interactions to date (approximately 80,000 interactions by 290 students -- 16 times more interactions with almost 3 times more students than previous studies on educational networks) and compare the social interaction data with the academic scores of the students. Our first finding is that social diversity is negatively correlated with performance. This is explained by our second finding: highly performing students interact in groups of similarly performing peers. This effect is stronger the higher the student performance is. Indeed, low performance students tend to initiate many transient interactions independently of the performance of their target. In other words, low performing students act disassortatively with respect to their social network, whereas high scoring students act assortatively. Our data also reveals that highly performing students establish persistent interactions before mid and low performing ones and that they use more structured and longer cascades of information from which low performing students are excluded.