Abstract
Educational research has shown that academic achievement and peer relationships are associated from early school years, where friends play a significant role in influencing students' school adjustment, attitudes, and behaviors. The present study examines how individual academic performance is associated with friendships among 240 5th and 6th graders. The information on students' friendships, academic performance, gender, popularity, and social preference was collected in a convenience sample from 8 classrooms of 2 private-subsidized schools in Santiago, Chile. Longitudinal social network analysis (RSiena) was used to study the co-evolution of academic performance and friendship dynamics, by assessing simultaneously selection and influence processes, and by incorporating social status covariates (popularity and social preference) as moderators of friendship selection and influence. Results showed that friendships were more likely to occur between same-sex peers and between students with similar social status. Regarding social influence, friends influenced individual's academic performance. Moreover, socially preferred students were more likely to be influenced by friends' academic performance, but the same did not occur for popular students. These results might suggest that socially preferred students' attributes (cooperation, reciprocity, and high-quality friendships) would facilitate the influence of academic performance. In contrast, popular students would be less sensitive to their friends' academic performance focusing instead on salient behaviors (e.g., aggression). The findings underline the importance of understanding social network dynamics in educational settings.
Highlights
La investigación educativa ha mostrado que los logros académicos y las relaciones con pares se asocian desde los primeros años escolares, donde las amistades juegan un papel importante al influir en el rendimiento escolar, así como en las actitudes y los comportamientos de los estudiantes
This study adds to this literature by focusing on peer interactions, studying the co-evolution of individual academic performance and friendship dynamics among fifth and sixth graders
This study examined how individual academic performance is associated with friendships among fifth and sixth graders, testing the moderating effect of adolescents' own social status
Summary
La investigación educativa ha mostrado que los logros académicos y las relaciones con pares se asocian desde los primeros años escolares, donde las amistades juegan un papel importante al influir en el rendimiento escolar, así como en las actitudes y los comportamientos de los estudiantes. Peer influence becomes especially salient during the transition from childhood to adolescence (Buchmann & Dalton, 2002; Bukowski & Sippola, 2005), taking place in a broader social environment, such as classrooms and schools (Gest & Rodkin, 2011; Lomi et al, 2011; Winston & Zimmerman, 2003) in which specific behaviors are fostered or constrained by factors such as individual social status (e.g., popularity, social preference, admiration), the position of each student in the classroom network structure (e.g., centrality, closeness) and group norms. Methodological limitations have hindered the possibility of disentangling the causes of this similarity (Veenstra et al, 2013) These limitations refer to the consideration of only portions of students' interpersonal relationships but not the whole network, assuming the stability of peer groups and friendships and examining the selection and influence processes separately without an integrative approach to peer relations (Shin & Ryan, 2014). Stochastic actor-based models of social network analysis allow to test simultaneously changing individuals within changing networks, to understand how social networks unfold (selection processes), and how individuals change within these relations (influence processes)
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