INFORMATIONAL POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR REVEALING PUPILS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

Our experience shows that the interest of high school students in one or another subject field is connected to the probability of entering a particular university faculty. A user’s interests are presented in social networks via the texts published on his/her profile wall and participation in groups. Analyzing these texts and groups, to our mind, we are able to define the research areas this user is inclined to. Then we can divide possible entrants according to their interest into three groups (Humanities, Life Science, Physics and Mathematics) and differentiate users in every group according to the extent of their interest. This study is devoted to testing the hypothesis that pupils’ user data in social networks may signal about their interests in some of the subject fields and their future direction of studying at a university. In this case, we mean pupils studying in high school who are considered to the potential entrants; the analyzed social network is “VKontakte”. We aim at testing this hypothesis on one type of open data from users profiles only which is subscriptions to the communities. At the current stage of the study we work with the Humanities faculties only. The hypothesis has been tested on the school leavers in 2017 in Siberian Federal District which are registered in “VKontakte”; overall number is 126 thousand people. Having analyzed the most popular communities (75 thousand) among these pupils we have defined 1416 topics connected to school subjects: 73% Humanities, 18% Physics and Mathematics and 9% Natural science. Basing on this data a community classifier has been designed. The list of communities which every user out of those 126 thousand is subscribed to has been compared with the thematic classifier and the overall number has been calculated: communities of all topics, all educational communities and separately those communities which are on the Humanities, Nature Science, and Physics and Mathematics. Pupils rating on the number of subscriptions to the Humanities communities has resulted in their rating according to the interest in the Humanities. To test the hypothesis that a pupil with multiple subscriptions to the Humanities communities has a Humanity mindset, we have studied 9390 users with the most vivid interest in the Humanities. To be considered such a user, to our mind, a pupil should have more than 75% of communities devoted to the themes of the Humanities, not less that 5 subscriptions to the Humanities communities, and not less than 5% of educational communities. Each user in this group has been suggested to agree or disagree with the idea that he or she has a Humanities mindset and plan to enter a Humanities faculty. We have received replies from 1100 pupils and 904 of them (82%) confirmed their interest in the Humanities, while 176 (18%) disagreed with that. Assuming that pupils may mistakenly evaluate themselves those who denied their Humanities mindset have been provided with an additional test. 94 people out of those 176 have completed the diagnostic test aimed at building A.E. Golomshtok “Map of Interests”. As a result, 54 respondents have shown some interest in one or several Humanities working areas at the level from +3 to +5 out of the scale from -5 to +5. Therefore, regardless respondent’s denial of their inclination to the Humanities they have an interest in this field. The study resulted in the prove of the hypothesis that analyzing pupils subscriptions to thematic communities in “VKontakte” social network one can reveal their educational interests. The accuracy of the results is 82%, while in addition to that 5% respondents show interest not only to the Technics and Nature Science, but to the Humanities, as well.

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