Abstract
Most children experience some form of grouping in the classroom every day. Understanding how teachers make grouping decisions and their impacts on children’s social development can shed light on effective teacher practices for promoting positive social dynamics in the classroom. This study examined the influence of teachers’ grouping strategies on changes in young children’s social experiences with peers across an academic year. A total of 1,463 children (51% girls, Mage = 6.79, SDage = 1.22) and 79 teachers from kindergarten to third-grade classrooms participated in this study. Teachers rated children’s behavioral problems as the most important consideration when creating seating charts or assigning children to small groups. Promoting existing or new friendships was rated as the least important consideration. Heterogeneous ability grouping, rated as somewhat important by the teachers, was associated with a decrease in children’s friendships and yet also a decrease in girls’ experience with peer conflicts. Our findings begin to fill in the gaps in the literature on the social impacts of ability grouping for young children.
Highlights
The classroom is a primary social context in which school-age children experience various social interactions and relationships with peers
While classroom peer experiences can involve various relational aspects, in this study we focus on children’s friendship and peer conflicts, both of which are the most prevalent peer experiences in young children, and can lead to a wide range of socioemotional and academic difficulties across the life span, such as school failure and dropout (Coie and Dodge, 1998; Chang, 2003; Kutnick and Kington, 2005; Shin, 2017; Kamper-DeMarco and Ostrov, 2019)
About 14.8% of children were dual language learners and a total of 7.8% were in individualized education plan (IEP)
Summary
The classroom is a primary social context in which school-age children experience various social interactions and relationships with peers. As teachers are the key social agents with whom children spend the majority of their time in the classroom, they inevitably mediate children’s peer social experiences This occurs in part through their daily instructional decisions or classroom management, such as determining classroom physical layout, governing with whom children collaborate, and maximizing cross-gender or cross-ethnic interactions through heterogeneous grouping (Gremmen et al, 2018). These teacher practices change the immediate social environment for children and their peers, which shapes the social integration of the classrooms. Despite the importance of teacher practices in children’s peer social experiences in classrooms (Gremmen et al, 2016), empirical evidence supporting the social influence of teachers’ practices
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