Investigate the relationship between learners' social characteristics and academic achievements

Abstract

The social interaction behaviors of group learning have obtained a lot of attention from researches, and social network analysis (SNA) plays a critical role in exploring collective interactive patterns. In this paper, we investigated the experimental data from the discussion forum of "Discourse Analysis" course in a university learning platform. By calculating learners social characteristics, we explored the relationship between social characteristics and academic achievements, as well as the differences between various achieving learners. The results show that there exist strong positive correlations between most social characteristics and academic achievements, and the majority of high-achieving learners are located at the core position of the network. In addition, the high-achieving learners exhibited more active participations in discussions and received more posts compared with middle- and low-achieving learners.