Analysis of social network formation of students in a classroom

Abstract

We present a model that explores the organizational dynamics in a classroom where students have a fixed seating assignment. Using connection density β that dictates the level of social activity, and distance exponent γ that tunes the bias to short or long range connection, we show how the model captures network formation dynamics similar to those found in real student network. We find low to moderate level of social activity across all sections studied where β ranges from 0.14 to 0.55. In addition, we obtained γ around 0.10 to 0.75 which shows a weak dependence of link formation to distance. The results suggest that network formation is closer to a random process (γ = 0) than lattice-like interaction (γ ≥ 2) despite frequent exposure to nearest neighbors and fixed seating arrangement.