Study: High school friends' grades associated with individual student grades

Here is the latest from the Monitor on Psychology's "In Brief" section:

Grade point averages may be contagious in high-school social networks, finds a study conducted by scientists at Binghamton University. Researchers asked 158 11th-graders to categorize their peers as best friends, friends, acquaintances, strangers or relatives and mapped how students performed in school relative to their peer groups. The researchers found that students whose friends were performing better academically were more likely to improve their own scores. Researchers also observed the opposite: When a student's friends' GPAs declined, the student's GPA also dropped (PLoS ONE, Feb. 13).

The original article may be found here.

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