Non-Verbal Communication in the Classroom. Models of Social Contagion During an Exam in Secondary Education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17217208Keywords:
Interaction Analysis, Behavior, Educational Psychology, Social Interaction, Sociology, Cluster Analysis.Abstract
When middle and high school students take an exam, they seem to deliver their exams not independently, forming clusters both in time (the moment of delivery) and in space (the location in the classroom of the students of consecutive deliveries), thus suggesting the existence of a contagion effect among the students. We have investigated this example of non-verbal communication phenomenon which can affect the student’s academic performance, by recording data of more than 500 students in two different high schools, to find out if the data are well fitted by known contagion models. Methodologically, we use appropriate templates to record the time of the exam delivery for the students of different classrooms in a whole academic year, and check later if these data can be described with the known Verhulst model, used to describe population growth with limited resources and the evolution of epidemics (such as COVID19). Our results show that the experimental data are well described by the Verhulst model when the limit of time for completing the exam does not affect the corresponding classroom, i.e., when all the students deliver in time. However, when the classroom is affected by the time limitations, the data are not well fitted by contagion models. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists a kind of non-verbal communication among students during an exam, leading to imitation behaviors when deciding the delivery of their tests if the limitation of time is not an issue. This phenomenon may be produced by different factors of social psicology (gregarious effect, group polarization, etc.) which could be the subject of future research, as well as the possible effect of this contagion on the academic performance of the students.
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