Last decade, small group teaching has increasingly been implemented at universities, such as Learning Communities (LCs) at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen. LCs were compared to mentor groups, with the main difference that LCs are small groups who follow all courses together across the first semester, whereas mentor groups meet only once a week.

A positive relationship was expected between social and academic interaction and respectively self-efficacy and early study success and that these relationships were stronger for LCs compared to mentor groups. The survey data came from 407 first-year social sciences' students. The multilevel analyses showed that contact hours, social and academic interaction were positively related to self-efficacy. Academic interaction and self-efficacy contributed each to early study success. For students in LCs the positive effect of academic integration on self-efficacy was stronger than for students in mentor groups.