College peer effects on learning behaviors in synchronous online courses

This study contributes to the growing body of research on peer effects in educational contexts by examining the peer effects on learning behaviors, which are pivotal in understanding how peers impact academic achievements, especially in online education. Drawing upon an administrative dataset and a learning behavior dataset from an online education platform at a Chinese research university in 2020, we employ fixed effects and dynamic models to investigate the peer effects on undergraduates' class absence. Notably, we further consider partially overlapping networks of peers and utilize the class absence of “classmates of classmates” (who are not one's own classmates) as instrumental variables for peers' absence to address potential estimation biases. Our findings reveal significantly positive effects of classmates' class absence on individuals' both full-class and part-class absence in synchronous online courses. Additionally, heterogeneity analyses show that males, freshmen and sophomore students are more susceptible to peer influence and exhibit greater influence on their peers, and peer effects are stronger in subject required courses, courses with larger class sizes, courses with mandatory attendance policies, and among students in the same department or grade level.