Cooperation in the Multi-Ethnic Classroom (1994)

The Impact of Cooperative Group Work on Social Relationships in Middle Schools

Helen Cowie, Peter Smith, Michael Boulton, Rema Laver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138571105
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351335041
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1994, this book describes how cooperative group work can enhance relationships in the classroom, reduce prejudice and alleviate problems of victimisation and peer rejection. It combines quantitative experimental analysis with detailed case studies; considers the impact of the family on pupil behaviour; and concludes with practical recommendations to foster social acceptance in the classroom.

There is a strong emphasis on helping teachers to develop group work in their classrooms as an effective means of averting trouble and inducing a genuinely better attitude to collaboration with their fellow pupils. The difficulties in implementation which can arise if teachers are not motivated, or if pupils are disruptive, are honestly confronted.

The book will also help educational and developmental psychologists involved in resolving behavioural difficulties resulting from social tensions in multi-ethnic classrooms.

CHAPTER ONE: Peer acceptance, friendships and bully–victim problems in junior-school classrooms: an overview of research findings and theory

Introduction

Forming good relationships with peers is an extremely important aspect of a child’s world. Children who have difficulties in this domain are much more likely to suffer from problems in other areas of their lives, for example they may have a low sense of self-esteem and underachieve in academic work. Having the capacity to relate well to others is like a passport to positive feelings about self and others.

Some children show remarkable stability in their friendships, staying with the same friend throughout the school years and even, in some cases, into adulthood. Others have a wider network of relationships with peers which changes over time, with circumstances and according to the particular interests of the moment.

Ben, aged 10, has been friends with Alex since they met at first school. He explains it in this way:

Alex shows his friendship back to me. He likes me. He plays with me, shares his toys with me. Alex agrees with me and shares my feelings about things we like. He enjoys my company.

He stands up for me when someone is being unfriendly. I stood up for him when he was being bullied and he stands up for me.

We do quarrel but we usually make it up. Sometimes we have an argument and then next time we meet we forget about it. It’s in the past and it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t have too many friends. If I had millions of friends and I had an argument with him, I could walk off. But instead I try to make it up with him.

Shaista and Nazia have been firm friends since Shaista joined the class at the beginning of the year. They share everything at school and often play together at weekends. Nazia says of Shaista:

I like her because she keeps secrets and she makes me laugh. She’s very helpful and friendly – and she’s thoughtful. She knows the answers to things and helps me if I can’t do something.

Shaista says:

When I first came to this school I didn’t know anybody but Nazia – and that’s because she lives next door and she called round for me when we first moved. At school she sat beside me and was friendly. She’s my best friend now and I can tell her things. I share my secrets.

At my last school I had a best friend. She were different from me because she were Indian. And then everyone in my school – all the muslim children – said, ‘Why do you be best friend with an Indian?’ I didn’t know what to say. I just ignored them.

Children’s close friendships are typically characterised by openness, good humour and honesty. Older children in the primary school are also likely to report that they share intimate thoughts with their close friends, and that they value qualities of loyalty and trustworthiness. They demonstrate through their friendships that they are sensitive to one another’s feelings. Popular children are acknowledged by their peers for being friendly, sociable, kind, competent, willing to help and supportive. For children who do not have this kind of interpersonal experience from peers school can be a very unpleasant place.

The past decade has seen a rapid growth of interest in children’s social relationships with peers. These relationships can be extremely complex. In many cases, peer relationships can be a source of great support during the childhood years and provide valuable experiences for growth in cognitive, social and emotional domains. However, it is now equally clear that social relationships can be a source of great anguish for some children and problems with peer relationships can lead to experiences that may be damaging both in the short term as well as over a period of many years that extends well into adulthood.

It would be impossible to review all of the theoretical and empirical work on children’s social relations in one chapter, even if the review was limited to the most recent advances in our knowledge. Instead, in this chapter and the following one, we will focus on three aspects of the social worlds of junior school children that may be especially important for their well-being. These are peer acceptance and friendships, bully–victim relationships, and relationships with children from different ethnic groups. Of course it would be wrong to give the impression that these three facets of children’s social relationships are completely independent. They are not separate and the mechanisms by which they mutually influence one another are beginning to be understood. Nevertheless, it is convenient to begin by considering these three topics separately, not least because our current knowledge of them has come from almost independent research traditions. In later sections of this chapter and the ensuing one, some of the ways in which these three aspects of peer relationships may interrelate will be discussed.

Peer acceptance and friendship

The distinction between peer acceptance and friendship

Acceptance by one’s peers and friendship are not synonymous terms (Berndt, 1984; Bukowski and Hoza, 1989; Mannarino, 1976). Children themselves typically make a distinction between peers that they like and those that are ‘true friends’, although of course there may be some overlap. This may lead to a situation in which a child is generally liked and/or accepted by most of her or his classmates, but who nevertheless has no close friends. Similarly, a child who is poorly accepted and/or disliked by most classmates may still have satisfying mutually close friendships with one or a few classmates.

The ways in which one is accepted by peers and the ways in which one makes friendships, may differ in important ways. This also appears to hold true for the maintenance of peer acceptance and friendships, and for the benefits that accrue from them. Furman and Buhrmester (1985), for example, suggest that such things as intimacy, affection, loyalty and availability can be obtained in the context of friendship whereas a sense of inclusion is more likely to develop in the context of general peer relationships (for further discussion see below). For these reasons we will begin by looking at what we know about peer acceptance, prior to focussing on friendships per se.

Peer acceptance

Peer acceptance generally refers to how much an individual is liked or disliked by her or his peers. While such a construct can be (and has been) studied in a number of different ways, categorisation of children in these terms has usually been based on sociometric techniques. Perhaps the most influential study in this area was that by Coie, Dodge and Coppotelli (1982). Certainly it has stimulated many other researchers to investigate and report on children’s peer acceptance. Typically, individual children are asked to nominate ‘some’ (often three) classmates that they ‘like the most’ (or ‘like to play with’ or other similar positive nominations) and ‘some’ that they ‘like the least’ (or other corresponding negative nominations). In most cases, the ‘social unit’ from which data are generated has been the class a child is in. In some studies, children are asked to consider just same-sex classmates, whereas in others they can select from both boys and girls.

Based on the pattern of nominations received by every child in the class, each individual is classified as belonging to one of five or six sociometric status types. In general, popular children are those that receive many ‘like the most’ nominations and few if any ‘like the least’ nominations. Rejected children receive many ‘like the least’ nominations and few if any ‘like the most’ nominations. Neglected children receive few if any of both ‘like the most’ and ‘like the least’ nominations. Controversial children are those that receive many ‘like the most’ and many ‘like the least’ nominations. Finally, average children are those that receive an average number of both ‘like the most’ and ‘like the least’ nominations; and other children (usually near the average) are those that fit none of these five categories exactly. Table 1.1 shows a schematic representation that may help to conceptualise these different sociometric groups.

Table 1.1 Different types of sociometric status

The distinctions between these different groups of children are thought to be important and researchers have identified distinct sets of causes, correlates and consequences for each. Here we shall focus on what have been considered ‘problematic’ groups – the rejected and neglected groups – since, as we shall see, research has shown that the low levels of peer acceptance associated with them may carry increased risks of various negative outcomes.

The distinction between rejected and neglected pupils has proven to be especially useful for understanding low levels of peer acceptance. Rejected children, in general, seem to be more salient members of the peer group than neglected children, and this probably stems from their inappropriate behaviour with peers. Neglected children on the other hand appear to go largely unnoticed by the majority of their peers, at least to the extent that they are not actively disliked.

In trying to understand the antecedents, correlates and consequences of each type of sociometric status, researchers have to consider an array of different variables for all three. For example, aggression, cooperation, playgroup entry tactics and play styles are just four of the categories of behavioural measures that have been studied. Some of these are shown in Table 1.2. These have been augmented by measures of children’s social cognition, including the social goals they pursue during peer interactions and their ability to detect the intentions of peers, as well as measures of children’s affect, particularly their loneliness, and non-behavioural characteristics such as physical attractiveness and even birth order.

Sociometric status and behaviour

In this review, we will try to capture some of the more important differences that have been found to characterise the six sociometric status groups. In this respect, perhaps aggression has received most attention. It appears to be an especially salient variable distinguishing rejected children from all others. Coie, Christopoulos, Terry, Dodge and Lochman (1989) stated that ‘It is true that when peers and trained unfamiliar observers provide information about rejected children’s behavior, the most compelling reason for peer rejection appears to be aggressive behavior’ (p. 224).

Table 1.2 Some behavioural characteristics of the five main sociometric status types

This conclusion needs to be qualified in an important way. Dodge and Coie (1987) have emphasised the distinction between reactive and proactive aggression. The former is considered to involve a hostile reaction and/or retaliation to some external event (such as frustration or provocation), whereas the latter is thought to occur in the absence of any immediate aversive stimulus, without anger, and may include such behaviour as coercion and bullying. The available evidence suggests that proactive aggression is most likely to be associated with rejected status (Coie and Kupersmidt, 1983). On the other hand, reactive aggression does not appear to be closely related to it. Indeed, some results suggest that aggression in response to provocations and/or prior aggression by other children appears to be positively correlated with acceptance by one’s peers. Thus, standing up for oneself by not being pushed around unfairly appears to be a useful strategy children may use to gain acceptance by their peers.

Several studies, then, have shown that unprovoked aggression is a correlate of rejected status – children who are classified as being rejected on the basis of sociometric techniques tend to show significantly higher levels of this type of aggression with peers than any of the other status groups. These results, while interesting in their own right, are limited in that they do not tell us whether the elevated levels of aggression typically preceded and/or caused a child’s rejected status, or instead whether most individuals concerned were initially rejected for some other reason and only once they were rejected did they begin to show higher than average levels of proactive aggression.

To help overcome this type of limitation, researchers such as Kenneth Dodge and John Coie in the U.S.A. developed methods whereby initially unfamiliar children were brought together in special play sessions over a period of weeks or months. They were then able to study the way the behaviour of the children influenced the development of their sociometric status. Results clearly showed that elevated levels of proactive aggression preceded the acquisition of rejected status, suggesting that the former caused the latter in the majority of cases (Coie and Kupersmidt, 1983; Dodge, 1983).

Despite this pattern of results, it would be wrong to give the impression that there is a strong one-to-one relationship between rejected sociometric status and high levels of proactive aggression. While this does appear to hold in a general sense, two variables that mediate the relationship are age and sex. Rejected status is more strongly related to aggression in children above seven or eight years of age than below. One explanation for this age effect is in terms of social norms (Coie, Christopoulos, Terry, Dodge and Lochman, 1989). Aggression is more prevalent in children prior to their reaching junior school age and so it may not be seen as unusual or deviant, at least to the extent that it is seen in this way by slightly older children who engage in fewer instances of aggression. In a similar sort of way, the relationship between rejection and aggression appears to be stronger for boys than for girls, perhaps because girls show less aggression than boys.

Another reason why we should be cautious about accepting that rejection and unprovoked aggression are always strongly related is that not all rejected children show higher than average levels of proactive aggression. Recent work using cluster analytical techniques suggests that rejected children do not form a homogenous group. In one study, Coie, Christopoulos, Terry, Dodge and Lochman (1989) reported that four sub-groups of rejected children could be identified. The first group consisted of rejected-aggressive children, the second group contained rejected children who were physically unattractive but not aggressive, the third group consisted of the rejected children who engaged in strange behaviour (such as making strange noises and acting silly) but not aggression, and the fourth cluster contained those rejected children who were average on all of the above traits.

Some other researchers have also distinguished between rejected-aggressive children and rejected-withdrawn children. The former tend to be seen by peers and/or by teachers as being immature, easily angered, bossy and difficult to understand (Crick, 1991). They also tend to be non-cooperative and highly aggressive (Cillessen, van IJzendoorn, van Lieshout and Hartup, 1992). In contrast, rejected-withdrawn children tend to be perceived by teachers and/or peers as being highly submissive and withdrawn but only moderately aggressive (Crick, 1991).

Not all highly aggressive children are classified as rejected. For example, some studies have found that controversial children, who receive many ‘like the least’ nominations and ‘like the most’ nominations from their classmates, typically engage in both high levels of aggression as well as high levels of prosocial behaviour (Newcomb and Bukowski, 1983; Coie and Dodge, 1988).

Neglected status children have been the focus of fewer studies than have rejected childre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter One: Peer acceptance, friendships and bully–victim problems in junior-school classrooms: an overview of research findings and theory
• Chapter Two: Ethnicity, relationships and attitudes in children
• Chapter Three: Cooperative group work in primary schools
• Chapter Four: The background to the project
• Chapter Five: In-service training and support
• Chapter Six: The effects of cooperative group work on social relationships
• Chapter Seven: Individual differences and case studies of children
• Chapter Eight: Conclusions and recommendations
• Bibliography
• Index