WSU Physics M.S. Thesis Defense - Hannah Benston

Wright State University Department of Physics

M.S. Physics Thesis Defense

• Hannah Benston
• Dr. Adrienne Traxler, Advisor
• Friday, Feb. 25 at 10 a.m.
• Virtual Meeting (Please contact the Physics Department for access details)

Using Network Analysis to Contrast Three Models of Student Forum Discussions

There is much research about how actors and events in social networks affect each other. In our research, we are creating three network models for discussion forums in three semesters of undergraduate general physics courses. Our study seeks to understand what students’ interactions in discussion boards says about the classroom dynamic. That is, we wanted to understand more about things like what students are most central to the networks and is this consistent across different network models? We also wanted to better understand things about how students may or may not group together. Things examined included what relationships (student to student, student to instructor, etc.) are formed, subjects regarding centralization, various clustering, and correlation coefficients, and how participation in a forum unfolds. We also looked at network model constructions and how these constructions may affect student interactions. These attributes are analyzed among individual semesters, but also compared/contrasted across all three, to see if they maintain across different network model formations. We found that in general as models increase in connectivity, we were able to see a rise in network measures like centralization and average degree. We also saw a drop in network measure values such as average vertex-vertex distance and diameter. Finally, we discovered that changing a model from undirected to directed made an appreciable change in results. Overall, our research gave us an appreciation of different network model construction and how centrality may affect social networks.