Predicting the academic underachievement in a high school in Spain over the next few years: A dynamic modeling approach

In this paper we propose a dynamic model to understand the evolution of the academic underachievement in a high school in Spain. This model is based on ideas of Christakis and Fowler where individual habits may be transmitted by social contact. Thus, to build the model we suppose that a student has academic failure when she/he gets into study habits transmitted by students with bad academic habits. From the available academic results of the Spanish high school educational system during the period 1999–2008, we fit the model to the data in order to obtain the parameters of the model. Then, we predict the academic underachievement evolution over the next few years.