No Arabic abstract
Quantitative understanding of relationships between students behavioral patterns and academic performances is a significant step towards personalized education. In contrast to previous studies that mainly based on questionnaire surveys, in this paper, we collect behavioral records from 18,960 undergraduate students smart cards and propose a novel metric, called orderness, which measures the regularity of campus daily life (e.g., meals and showers) of each student. Empirical analysis demonstrates that academic performance (GPA) is strongly correlated with orderness. Furthermore, we show that orderness is an important feature to predict academic performance, which remarkably improves the prediction accuracy even at the presence of students diligence. Based on these analyses, education administrators could better guide students campus lives and implement effective interventions in an early stage when necessary.
Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small sample sizes, there is currently no quantification of the interplay of these factors. Here, we study the academic performance among a cohort of 538 undergraduate students forming a single, densely connected social network. Our work is based on data collected using smartphones, which the students used as their primary phones for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from a single population allows us to directly compare the explanatory power of individual and social characteristics. We find that the most informative indicators of performance are based on social ties and that network indicators result in better model performance than individual characteristics (including both personality and class attendance). We confirm earlier findings that class attendance is the most important predictor among individual characteristics. Finally, our results suggest the presence of strong homophily and/or peer effects among university students.
Fermilab is dedicated to hosting world-class experiments in search of new physics that will operate in the coming years. The Muon g-2 Experiment is one such experiment that will determine with unprecedented precision the muon anomalous magnetic moment, which offers an important test of the Standard Model. We describe in this study the accelerator facility that will deliver a muon beam to this experiment. We first present the lattice design that allows for efficient capture, transport, and delivery of polarized muon beams. We then numerically examine its performance by simulating pion production in the target, muon collection by the downstream beam line optics, as well as transport of muon polarization. We finally establish the conditions required for the safe removal of unwanted secondary particles that minimizes contamination of the final beam.
A key question concerning collective decisions is whether a social system can settle on the best available option when some members learn from others instead of evaluating the options on their own. This question is challenging to study, and previous research has reached mixed conclusions, because collective decision outcomes depend on the insufficiently understood complex system of cognitive strategies, task properties, and social influence processes. This study integrates these complex interactions together in one general yet partially analytically tractable mathematical framework using a dynamical system model. In particular, it investigates how the interplay of the proportion of social learners, the relative merit of options, and the type of conformity response affect collective decision outcomes in a binary choice. The model predicts that when the proportion of social learners exceeds a critical threshold, a bi-stable state appears in which the majority can end up favoring either the higher- or lower-merit option, depending on fluctuations and initial conditions. Below this threshold, the high-merit option is chosen by the majority. The critical threshold is determined by the conformity response function and the relative merits of the two options. The study helps reconcile disagreements about the effect of social learners on collective performance and proposes a mathematical framework that can be readily adapted to extensions investigating a wider variety of dynamics.
Social networks are pivotal for learning. Yet, we still lack a full understanding of the mechanisms connecting networks with learning outcomes. Here, we present the results of a large scale study (946 elementary school children from 45 different classrooms) designed to understand the social strategies used by elementary school children. We mapped the social networks of students using both, a non-anonymous version of a prisoners dilemma and a survey of nominated friendships, and compared the strategies played by students with their GPAs. We found that higher GPA students invest more strategically in their relationships, cooperating more generously with friends and less generously with non-friends than lower GPA students. Our findings suggest that the higher selectivity of social capital investments by high performing students may be one of the mechanisms helping them reap the learning benefits of their social networks.
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here we develop an original framework for measuring how a publications citation rate $Delta c$ depends on the reputation of its central author $i$, in addition to its net citation count $c$. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly-cited scientists, using the total citations $C_{i}$ of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover $c_{times}$ which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with $c < c_{times}$, the authors reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in $C_{i}$. However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that for $cgeq c_{times}$ the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science.