Relationship between Physical Behaviors of Students and Their Scholastic Performance

Studies in social science and social computing have revealed that group dynamics plays an important role in group performance. Face-to-face interaction among group members has been regarded as one of the major determinants of performance in various business fields. However, the relationship between inter-child interaction in the school environment and their scholastic performance is unknown. An experiment using wearable sensor badges of the relationships between a student's bodily movements and face-to-face interactions and the student's scholastic performance showed that there was a strong correlation for both. Students whose bodily movements were in harmony with those of their classmates during class and students with more face-to-face interactions during break times had better scholastic performance. These results indicate that systematically managing students' behaviors at school on the basis of objective data measured using wearable sensor badges may improve scholastic performance, which is contrary to the widely accepted view that a student's scholastic performance is mainly determined by the student's social and economic background rather than by school environmental factors.