Social Goals in the Classroom

Findings on Student Motivation and Peer Relations

Martin H. Jones, Martin H. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429887734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Social Goals in the Classroom is the first volume to comprehensively examine the variety of students' non-academic goals and motivations within the classroom.

Each expertly written chapter defines and investigates a particular aspect of students' social objectives before addressing related findings on academic performance, interpersonal outcomes, and directions for future research. Presented in three succinct and comprehensive parts, this book reviews, expands upon, and theoretically synthesizes current research on the many different social goals to offer readers a thorough understanding of non-academic desires and their consequences on learners' educational experiences.

Situated in evidence-based theory as well as real-world contexts such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, and social media, this insightful collection—ideal for graduate students, teachers, and researchers—explores how students' social motives influence their academic performance and peer relationships.

PART I

Overview

1

THE SOCIAL SIDE OF CLASSROOMS

Introducing Social Goals and the Book’s Purpose

Martin H. Jones

Think back to when you were in grade school. You may remember the classroom as a place where you learned math, social studies, and other academic disciplines. You may also remember that the classroom was a place where you met friends, pursued romantic interests, and worried about whom you sat with at lunch. Both then and now, students come to the classroom with a mix of academic learning goals as well as desires to interact socially with their friends, classmates, and teachers. These are often social goals, or the psychological reasons behind why students socially interact during school. Not only do students come to a learning setting with their own social goals, but teachers, administrators, and others involved in any given learning setting hold their own social desires apart from the learning experience. For example, teachers may come to the learning setting with a desire to be liked, or feared, by students and fellow teachers, maintain social control of the classroom, and build positive rapport with their students. As students and teachers naturally comingle their social and learning goals, the learning setting becomes an environment not strictly for learning.

Often, teachers, parents, and community members presume that a school classroom is a place centered on learning. The presumption is that schools and individual classroom exist as a way to educate youth. While not untrue, this presumption does not consider that students are housed within a social setting (i.e., a classroom or virtual learning environment). Students’ classroom experiences include motives not directly related to learning, but, rather, to the “social side” of the classroom. The “social side” of the classroom includes the sometimes overlooked parts of the schooling experience that are not directly linked to academic content, or may be only partially linked to academic learning (e.g., extracurricular activities). The social side of the classroom entails the many interpersonal interactions within a classroom or learning setting. This may be between classmates, between students and instructors, or among teachers. These interpersonal interactions often involve personal motives. For example, two students desire a romantic relationship, while another student plots revenge for an aggressive comment made by a student at lunch. These interpersonal interactions occur within a learning setting, and can affect learning, but these social interactions are not directly part of academic instruction. These interpersonal desires are students’ social goals.

Defining Social Goals

As a general definition, social goals in the classroom are one or more psychological desires for non-academic outcomes occurring in formal and informal learning settings that a person can consciously or unintentionally use. The emphases on this definition are threefold. First, social goals constitute a psychologically desired outcome, or a purposeful approach to obtaining some type of social consequence. Social goals are inherently psychological in nature as individuals hold preferences, beliefs, values, past experiences, and opinions about what they want from a social interaction. Second, social goals exist within a classroom or learning setting. Social goals may also happen outside of the learning setting, but this book will focus mostly on social goals within learning environments. Third, social goals can exist apart from academic desires as well as co-exist within academic pursuits. There are times when students employ social goals along with their academic goals, but social goals can also be unrelated to academic pursuits.

Social goals can include, but are not limited to, making friends, developing prosocial behaviors, becoming popular, and socially controlling the classroom. Social goals lead to a range of outcomes from affecting academic performance to bullying classmates. Some of these outcomes may be specifically desired and strived for by the student, whereas individuals’ social goals can also produce unintended consequences by the student. The individual may hope that a new friendship emerges, a romantic relationship develops, or that one becomes more popular, but these goals could also hurt existing friendships, hurt a friend’s feelings, or result in bullying.

Purpose of this Book

Social goal research stands at a crossroads. As seen in Chapter 2, the earliest forms of social goal research emerged several decades ago. Over these past decades, a variety of social goal studies emerged across different psychological and sociological academic journals. These studies demonstrated a growing interest by researchers to understand why students pursue social interactions in school as well as the consequences of pursuing these social interactions. What followed these publications was the creation of several different psychological constructs trying to explain why students pursued these social interactions in school. Unfortunately, these articles often used the same terminology of “social goal” despite those articles utilizing different social behaviors (i.e., prosocial goals and social dominance goals could both be labeled as social goals, though they are quite different). Thus, our current understanding of what is a social goal often varies by how a given article operationally defined the social goal used within the manuscript. This book hopes to move past the current gridlock of defining what is a social goal by expanding and furthering the extant social goal literature.

The first step in moving past the social goal terminology roadblock is understanding that there is more than one social goal. “Social goal” is a more general term for what includes several specific social pursuits, which are housed under the label of being a social goal. Each of these social pursuits constitutes its own social goal. Thus, a social goal is not a singular psychological entity, but rather many social goals exist. The book explores several of these social goals in greater depth (Chapters 3 through 9). These chapters are not exhaustive in their inclusion of all social goals, but rather represent social goals that have some prominence in the extant literature. Further, each of the social goals is unique, but they all branch from the same premise of understanding why individuals might desire social interactions inside school.

As social goals present themselves inside schools, social goals might also be specific to the given context in which the goal appears. That is, social goals do not exist within psychological and social vacuums, but reciprocally interact with individuals’ social settings. These social settings come with their own specific socio-cultural contexts. Each context is unique with their own specific values, problems, and social rules. By delving into these social contexts, findings present a deeper understanding of how social goals operate as well as showing the interactive nature of context with social goals. How social goals are present within different contexts are more greatly explored in Chapter 10 through 14.

By understanding the cultural contexts, and acknowledging that multiple social goals exist, the field may begin moving forward. This book also attempts to move the field forward by utilizing two specific tactics. First, authors had freedom to expand and “fill-in” certain discussions whenever extant literature did not currently exist to support a topic or area. This choice hopefully encouraged the authors to think about progressing the field and providing a logical roadmap for future research, though empirical findings may not currently be present to support the given argument. Second, each chapter in this book presents areas of future research for the given social goal and context. The final chapter provides a more general discussion of future areas of social goal research and a brief discussion of what social goal research might entail in the year 2040. The freedom to write about current gaps in the literature and imagine the future of social goal research may propel social goal research past the current crossroads. Thus, this book’s purpose is describing the current state of social goal research, while urging the field toward a much richer understanding of students’ social goals.

Social Hierarchies and Interactions in School

Understanding how social goals function in school likely involves understanding the social dynamics inherent within schools. Schools include a variety of different social players: teachers, students, administrators, community members, maintenance staff, and even parents coming into the school to help classrooms or on field trips. Social players have an opportunity to use social goals with each other. Teachers may have certain social goals, such as exerting social dominance over their class or appearing cool to other teachers. At the same time, students can have social goals, such as exerting social dominance over their teachers and appearing cool to classmates.

Social players inside schools typically exist within coherent patterns or social hierarchies. Most schools contain a series of nested levels organized by classrooms, grade levels, school building, and then school districts. Social goals likely occur within and across each level of this hierarchy. Most social goal research exists within the classroom level when research occurs in elementary schools. In middle and high schools, social goal research may happen within classrooms, but also appears inside a given school grade and across the whole school. Still, most social goal research involves the most basic level of interpersonal interactions within classrooms.

Inside classrooms, the social hierarchy still exists on multiple nested levels. The first level is the individual, who will hold one or more social goals. The next level includes dyadic relationships. Dyadic relationships are between two people. These dyadic relationships may be reciprocal friendships (i.e., both dyadic members agree that the other is a friend) or between non-reciprocal friends (e.g., two classmates that are not friends, but may sit near each other). Next, groups of friends merge together to form peer groups. A peer group may vary in size and tightness of social bonds, but peer groups generally comprise multiple friendships that hold some type of homophily, or similarity, across members. Peer groups then reside within a larger social network. A social network is everyone that an individual may come into contact with, such as an elementary student’s classroom or the entire school for high school students. Across the social network and down to dyadic relationships, students have opportunities for utilizing their social goals with their peers.

Social Goals in Action

Students must navigate the learning experience of a classroom, while also managing their own social goals. Anecdotally, I experienced the dual navigation of social and learning goals while watching the high school men’s basketball state tournament. Besides the cheerleaders and athletes on the basketball court, there were high school seniors sitting in the front of the student section leading cheers and motivating the student section, with first year students sitting in the back and not leading any cheers. The position of students, the social roles and social expectations of the students, and why the students were even present within the basketball arena demonstrate how social goals intermingle with academic pursuits. It was a school-sponsored basketball tournament involving students, but the basketball game offered little direct academic content to the students. Still, the students were co-regulating learning and social goals. This became apparent as the game lasted late into the night, which meant that the students chose between sleep and supporting the school’s basketball team. Further, as most of these students were younger than 18, parents likely gave explicit or implied permission of some type to have their children attend the sporting event. Hence, students, teachers, parents, and even administrators are complicit in developing an environment where students co-regulate their academic interests and their own social ...