Pedagogues and researchers commonly agree that students’ social integration has an impact on their school behavior (e.g. Klein & Timm, 2005; Raufelder, 2010). Theoretically, this can be derived from the fact that individuals learn and develop in the interplay with others. Especially peers are of crucial importance: by comparison and differentiation, children learn about themselves and develop their identity. As children grow up, peers are considered to become even more relevant, since parents forfeit their influence (e.g. Bandura, 1979; Bronfenbrenner, 1989). Given that children spend a major part of their time in school, it is to be expected that their fellow students have a considerable impact on them, especially with regards to school-related attitudes and behaviors. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for this assumption is scarce. Studies that attend to the matter often rely on students’ self-reports for the measurement of the quality of the relations they have with their fellow students. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), for example, measures students’ relations to each other and social integration asking students if they felt like belonging and how they perceived class climate in general.

Social network analysis provides an alternative for the evaluation of students’ relations and their social integration. With this method all students are asked to report their relation to all other students in their class. Thus, their social positions can be determined from their own and from their fellow students’ perspective. Compared to self-reports this approach leads to more objective measures for social integration. However, social network analysis provides a broad range of measures and existing studies use different ones for the evaluation of social integration (Rehrl & Gruber, 2007). With our paper we contribute to the discussion about suitable measures for the analysis of social integration in the school context and the impacts students’ social integration has on school-related behavior.

Existing studies that apply social network analysis in the school context revealed that socially preferred and well integrated students have more school success, i.e. they have better grades, perform better in the eyes of their teachers, have higher cognitive and academic outcomes and are less likely to retain a grade (Dunkake, 2013; Lubbers, Van Der Werf, Snijders, Creemers & Kuyper, 2006; Oswald & Krappmann, 2004; Van Den Oord & Van Rossem, 2002). In almost all of these studies school achievement is accessed via grades or teachers’ evaluations. Therefore, the first research question followed here is, whether students’ social integration in a class correlates with their achievement as measured with standardized competence tests. Exemplarily, this will be examined here for students’ achievement in mathematics.

It has been shown repeatedly, that student’s achievement in mathematics is highly correlated with several attitudes towards this subject and that such attitudes can depend on students’ social environment (e.g. Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez & Chrostowski, 2004; Kleine, Schmitt & Doll, 2013). Consequently, it can be expected that students’ social integration will not only correlate with their mathematics achievement but also with their self-efficacy. Therefore, the second research question of this paper is, whether a connection between self-efficacy and students’ social integration can be found.

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