Poster #225 - Do Friends Influence How Early Adolescent Students Perceive Their Teachers?

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Peer groups are critical contexts within classrooms for learning during adolescence, and student beliefs and behaviors are socialized in these context (Altermatt & Pomerantz, 2003; Kindermann, 2007). Students tend to be similar to their friends in academic beliefs and behaviors (Shin & Ryan, 2014; Veenstra, Dijkstra, Steglich, & Van Zalk, 2013). As Ryan and Shin (2018) describe, students form friendships with similar or compatible peers and in turn these relationships make up a context that affects students’ beliefs and behaviors. While much research has looked at peer influence on academic engagement, motivation, and achievement, little research has examined peer influence on beliefs about the teacher and classroom climate. According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory (2001) and more recent studies, students learn from and influence each other via information exchange, modeling, and reinforcement (Altermatt & Broady, 2009; Glick & Rose, 2011). For example, peers may make comments on the extent to which their teacher is fair, interesting, strict, or boring. In turn, these comments can influence how students develop views of and interactions with their teachers.

Our study examines how classroom friend groups influence student perceptions of teaching practices, while controlling for peer selection processes. Moreover, we assess whether standardized observations of instructional support moderate this process based on teachers’ management of social dynamics in the classroom (Farmer et al. 2011, Shin & Ryan, 2014). We focus on three teacher practices: 1) autonomy support, 2) fairness, and 3) facilitation of interest and understanding.

There were 54 fifth and sixth grade math and science classes from three diverse, predominantly low-income school districts. In the fall and spring, students completed peer nominations of friendship and reports of their teacher’s practice. Observers were certified in the CLASS observational coding system (Pianta et al., 2008) and visited classrooms on two days in the fall. These observations generated an overall instructional score for each classroom/teacher.

We specifically examined selection and influence effects through longitudinal social network analysis, specifically Stochastic Actor-Based Modeling using SIENA (Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis; Snijders, Burt, & Steglich, 2009). SIENA allowed us to (a) control for structural features of networks and (b) simultaneously examine the extent to which selection and influence contribute to similarity between friends. Our model assesses whether students within certain peer groups and within certain positions in a peer group (e.g., friends with only one other member) are more likely to adopt their peers’ beliefs about the teacher. Our descriptive analyses reveal some stability of peer networks from fall to spring and greater shared perceptions of the teacher among friend groups (homophily) in spring than fall (Table 1).

Our preliminary analyses with select classrooms support our hypothesis that peers’ influence of friends’ beliefs about the teacher play a role in students’ changing their beliefs (Table 2). Although, our SIENA analyses with moderators for 54 classrooms is still processing, we hypothesize that if we do multi-group analysis (e.g., Delay et al., 2016; Shin & Ryan, 2014), peers influence their friends’ beliefs about their teachers’ practice as moderated by observed teacher instructional practices based on descriptive and preliminary analyses.

Authors

• Sarah E McKellar, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Lydia Laninga-Wijnen, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison M. Ryan, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author