Researchers led by Manuel Cebrian from the University of California San Diego analysed 80,000 interactions between 290 students in a collaborative learning environment for college courses.
The major finding was that a higher number of online interactions was usually an indicator of a higher score in the class. High achievers also were more likely to form strong connections with other students and to exchange information in more complex ways, researchers said.
High achievers tended to form cliques, shutting out low-performing students from their interactions. Students who found themselves shut out were not only more likely to have lower grades, they were also more likely to drop out of the class entirely, the study published in the journal Nature Scientific reported.
"Elite groups of highly connected individuals formed in the first days of the course," said Cebrian in a statement.
"For the first time, we showed that there is a very strong correspondence between social interaction and exchange of information - a 72 per cent correlation," he said.
"But almost equally interesting is the fact that these high-performing students form 'rich-clubs', which shield themselves from low-performing students, despite the significant efforts by these lower-ranking students to join them," researchers said.
"The weaker students try hard to engage with the elite group intensively, but can't. This ends up having a marked correlation with their dropout rates," they said.
