Analyse social influence on student motivation based on social activity network

Student motivation is one of the most important individual characters for explaining student performance in class. Existing researches show that it can be affected largely by social-contextual factors. Rather than focusing on social relationship, in this paper we construct social activity networks for analyzing the impact of collective behaviors on student motivation. We conduct field experiments to compare social activity networks with relationship networks by analyzing the structural characteristics. We also investigate the dynamic of social activities, and validate the effectiveness of social activity network in reflecting social influence on student motivation. Our results show that social activities are important factors affecting student motivation.