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.