Abstract
Simple SummaryThe presence of others helps us when we are good or an expert at something and hinders us when we are bad or novice. Such social facilitation or inhibition is well-documented in adults, but much less in children despite the omnipresence of peers throughout education. To explore potential peer presence effects on children’s academic performance, fourth-graders performed basic numerical and language skills (typically mastered at their age) either alone or with a schoolmate. For comparison, the same was performed in adults. We found that a schoolmate’s presence enabled children to perform more like adults, with a better response strategy and faster and less variable response times than children tested alone. This provides research-based evidence supporting pedagogical methods promoting collective practice of individually acquired knowledge. Future studies pursuing this hitherto neglected developmental exploration of peer presence effects on academic achievements might have the potential to help educators tailor their pedagogical choices to maximize peer presence when beneficial and minimize it when harmful. The present study also paves the way towards a neuroimaging investigation of how peer presence changes the way the child brain processes cognitive tasks relevant to education.Little is known about how peers’ mere presence may, in itself, affect academic learning and achievement. The present study addresses this issue by exploring whether and how the presence of a familiar peer affects performance in a task assessing basic numeracy and literacy skills: numerosity and phonological comparisons. We tested 99 fourth-graders either alone or with a classmate. Ninety-seven college-aged young adults were also tested on the same task, either alone or with a familiar peer. Peer presence yielded a reaction time (RT) speedup in children, and this social facilitation was at least as important as that seen in adults. RT distribution analyses indicated that the presence of a familiar peer promotes the emergence of adult-like features in children. This included shorter and less variable reaction times (confirmed by an ex-Gaussian analysis), increased use of an optimal response strategy, and, based on Ratcliff’s diffusion model, speeded up nondecision (memory and/or motor) processes. Peer presence thus allowed children to at least narrow (for demanding phonological comparisons), and at best, virtually fill in (for unchallenging numerosity comparisons) the developmental gap separating them from adult levels of performance. These findings confirm the influence of peer presence on skills relevant to education and lay the groundwork for exploring how the brain mechanisms mediating this fundamental social influence evolve during development.
Highlights
An unvarying feature of schools worldwide is that children are educated in the constant presence of peers, yet scientific research does not always take this social aspect of learning into account
Eight children were excluded from the analyses because they suffered from reading disability, attention deficit, or anxiety disorder
Longer and more variable reaction time (RT) are two well-known markers of cognitive immaturity during development [33,64]. By reducing both RTs average and variability, peer presence enabled children to compensate for their developmental lag, virtually completely for unchallenging numerosity comparisons, and partly for demanding phonological comparisons
Summary
An unvarying feature of schools worldwide is that children are educated in the constant presence of peers, yet scientific research does not always take this social aspect of learning into account. Attributes: same- or other-sex, same- or other-ethnicity, same or different cognitive and academic abilities, etc., on academic achievements [1,2,3,4,5] Whether this knowledge can reliably be used to implement policies that improve academic outcomes remains, a matter of debate [6]. By contrast, about how peers’ mere presence, irrespective of their attributes, may, in itself affect academic learning and achievement. This is despite the fact that, contrary to children’s individual characteristics, peer presence can be relatively manipulated (minimized or maximized) in a variety of amenable ways (e.g., by adapting pedagogical methods, modulating visual privacy through classroom arrangements, or improving auditory privacy via inexpensive devices such as noise-cancelling headphones)
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