Social learning, the ability to perceive, interpret, and assess the behavior of one’s peers, is crucial for forming meaningful relationships and succeeding in various learning environments. Yet, the rise of online and hybrid settings poses new challenges to socialization. Here, we study the social interactions among 191 high school physics students in Chile, comparing online and hybrid classrooms that were assigned in the COVID-19 pandemic context. We found that students in hybrid settings were more connected and more likely to form casual relationships outside their immediate friend groups, which allowed them to gather new information from diverse sources. Along the same lines, in online classrooms, students who excelled in physics occupied more central positions in social networks. This trend was not evident in hybrid settings, suggesting that when social cues are limited, academic performance gains greater importance in establishing social hierarchies and potentially limiting access to diverse information. Our study highlights the importance of social interactions in educational contexts and raises questions about the impact of relational inaccessibility on virtual learning.

中文翻译：

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混合教室中增强的社交联系与在线环境中的学术中心性

社交学习，即感知、解释和评估同伴行为的能力，对于形成有意义的关系和在各种学习环境中取得成功至关重要。然而，在线和混合环境的兴起给社交带来了新的挑战。在这里，我们研究了智利 191 名高中物理学生的社交互动，比较了在 COVID-19 大流行背景下分配的在线课堂和混合课堂。我们发现，混合环境中的学生联系更紧密，更有可能在直接朋友群体之外形成随意的关系，这使他们能够从不同来源收集新信息。同样，在在线课堂上，物理成绩优异的学生在社交网络中占据了更核心的位置。这种趋势在混合环境中并不明显，这表明当社会线索受到限制时，学业成绩在建立社会等级制度和潜在限制对多样化信息的获取方面变得更加重要。我们的研究强调了教育环境中社交互动的重要性，并提出了关系不可达对虚拟学习的影响的问题。