Correlations between student connectivity and academic performance: a pandemic follow-up

TL;DR

This study examines how student collaboration networks relate to academic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic across different course formats, revealing that environment influences the strength of these correlations more than course delivery mode.

Contribution

It compares student collaboration and performance correlations across remote, hybrid, and in-person courses during the pandemic, highlighting environmental impacts.

Findings

Strong correlations in hybrid courses pre-pandemic and at CSM during pandemic

Weaker or no correlations in fully remote courses during pandemic

Missing nodes tend to reduce correlation estimates, not create false positives

Abstract

Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses from the University of Colorado Boulder and one course from the Colorado School of Mines. All three courses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for a comparison between the course at the Colorado School of Mines (in a fully remote format) with results from a previous pre-pandemic study of student collaboration at the Colorado School of Mines (in a hybrid format). We compute nodal centrality measures and calculate the correlation between student centrality and performance. Results varied widely between each of the courses studied. The course at the Colorado School of Mines had strong correlations between many centrality measures and performance which matched the patterns seen in the pre-pandemic study. The courses at the University of Colorado Boulder showed weaker correlations, and one course showed nearly no correlations at all between students' connectivity to their classmates and their performance. Taken together, the results from the trio of courses indicate that the context and environment in which the course is situated play a more important role in fostering a correlation between student collaboration and course performance than the format (remote, hybrid, in-person) of the course. Additionally, we conducted a short study on the effect that missing nodes may have on the correlations calculated from the measured networks. This investigation showed that missing nodes tend to shift correlations towards zero, providing evidence that the statistically significant correlations measured in our networks are not spurious.