Practitioner's guide to social network analysis: Examining physics anxiety in an active-learning setting

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive guide to social network analysis in education research, illustrating its application to physics anxiety in active-learning classrooms and highlighting the importance of dynamic peer interactions.

Contribution

It introduces practical methodologies and tools for applying social network analysis to educational settings, with a focus on student anxiety and interaction patterns.

Findings

Students with more outgoing interactions tend to experience increased physics anxiety.

The second half of the semester is crucial for reducing physics anxiety through peer interactions.

Dynamic group formation strategies benefit student anxiety reduction.

Abstract

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 physics majors, changes in their career-related beliefs (e.g., physics interest), and their academic success. In this paper, we aim to provide a practitioner's guide to carrying out research using SNA, including how to develop data collection instruments, set up protocols for gathering data, as well as identify network methodologies relevant to a wide range of research questions beyond what one might find in a typical primer. We illustrate these techniques using student anxiety data from active-learning physics classrooms. We explore the relationship between students' physics anxiety and the social networks they participate in throughout the course of a semester. We find that students' with greater numbers of outgoing interactions are more likely to experience negative anxiety shifts even while we control for {\it pre} anxiety, gender, and final course grade. We also explore the evolution of student networks and find that the second half of the semester is a critical period for participating in interactions associated with decreased physics anxiety. Our study further supports the benefits of dynamic group formation strategies that give students an opportunity to interact with as many peers as possible throughout a semester. To complement our guide to SNA in education research, we also provide a set of tools for letting other researchers use this approach in their work -- the {\it SNA toolbox} -- that can be accessed on GitHub.