This study draws on complete friendship network data on two first-year biological sciences cohorts at a selective university in the United States to investigate how and to what extent allocating students to curricular groups and grading their performance in class shape (1) processes of friend selection at the dyadic level and (2) friendship clustering at the network level. Through a set of stochastic actor-oriented models, results show that students tend to befriend peers from the same curricular group versus a different one (i.e., curricular group homophily) and befriend higher-performing peers (i.e., performance-based status). Follow-up analyses reveal that friendship clustering by curricular group placement is largely due to course co-enrollment (i.e., proximity), whereas academic-performance-based clustering is primarily the result of students aligning their own performance to match the average performance of their friends (i.e., influence). I discuss implications of these findings for helping to promote learning in higher education.

中文翻译：

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课程差异化和非正式网络：正式的分组和排名实践如何塑造大学学生之间的友谊


本研究利用美国一所精英大学两个一年级生物科学队列的完整友谊网络数据，调查如何以及在多大程度上将学生分配到课程组，并在班级形式中对他们的表现进行评分 （1） 二元水平的朋友选择过程和 （2） 网络层面的友谊聚类。通过一组随机的面向参与者的模型，结果表明，学生倾向于与来自同一课程组的同龄人交朋友，而不是与不同的课程组交朋友（即课程组同性恋），并与表现较高的同龄人交朋友（即基于绩效的状态）。后续分析显示，通过课程组安排进行的友谊聚类主要是由于课程共同注册（即接近），而基于学业表现的聚类主要是学生调整自己的表现以匹配他们朋友的平均表现（即影响力）的结果。我讨论了这些发现对帮助促进高等教育学习的意义。