Social Network and GPA

Science Daily reports that GPA may be contagious in high-school social networks

The researchers then mapped how students performed in school relative to their peer group, and correlated their social network with the change of their academic performance over time.
They found that students' whose friends were performing better academically were more likely to improve their own scores over time. The opposite effect was also seen: When their friends' GPA were lower, a given student's GPA was more likely to decrease as well.

Okay, so being exposed to success has a tendency to push you towards success. Sure. Common sense, in a way. More specifically it fits into the general framework of Harris' findings which I hereby oversimplify: peers are more important to kids than parents or teachers. It's an obvious support to all the parents who try to get their kids to disengage from bad influences, I suppose. It's not obvious that it can be used in a conventional school setting to raise academic performance: it tends to pull people towards the mean of some group, which may not be the whole school but each one who is pulled up is presumably exerting some slight downwards influence on the rest.

Still, I think that in the world of the Khan Academy and Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom, there may be a way to use this. Khan doesn't really have a notion of GPA: there are topics you've mastered, and others which you haven't. If each kid sees what his friends (online and offline, just nodes in his social network) have mastered, then he is being exposed to their successes. Accenting the positive, so to speak, is automatic; the negative is what isn't there. I don't know that this could be as simple as I'm now thinking, but it seems that it could help a lot.


(Or then again, maybe not.)