Investigating the relationship between centrality and change in sense of belonging for students in an active learning physics class

Social Network Analysis has become a common methodology within Physics Education Research to quantify the impacts that student interactions and classroom structure have on student outcomes. These relationships are typically quantified using a degree centrality metric: the number of connections a student has, such that a higher degree centrality would indicate a more central position in the network. However, when looking at these interdependent metrics as independent parameters they have not shown any statistically significant relationship with motivational outcomes like self-efficacy or sense of belonging. In this study, we instead characterize students' network positionality with various "network actor roles," and the strength of their connections using network paths, in the context of social capital. Using data from an interactive calculus-based physics 1 class, we find that students who are network isolates (no incoming or outgoing connections) or weakly connected report lower sense of belonging compared with other students, but, consistent with prior research, the number of connections were not correlated with sense of belonging. This indicates the potential for graph theoretical methods to enhance our understanding of student interactions in physics classrooms.