An Agent-Based Model to Explore Belief and Behavioural Change in a Classroom

A student classroom is a complex environment of social dynamics through which instructors attempt to navigate and find ways to improve their students’ behaviour. These complex dynamics make it difficult to predict how a student will react to an instructor’s interventions. We build an agent-based model to examine how an individual’s beliefs might spread through a classroom, and how they may affect behaviour, to be able to identify how an instructor can approach a classroom with the hopes of encouraging better note taking behaviour. The model is built on existing psychological models and consists of three parts: a behavioural change component in the form of the reasoned action approach, a social influence component, and an outcome feedback component. The agent’s beliefs determine their behaviour and are influenced by their peers’ beliefs. The results of this paper show that the model exhibits expected psychological phenomena such as polarisation and clustering. Additionally, we explore various possible instructor influence techniques such as an “all student” technique, an “influencer” technique, a “rotating” technique, and a more “targeted” technique.