1-183 - Beyond Average: Rethinking Classroom Composition and Peer Effects

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Peer influence is a critical mechanism of socialization during adolescence. Daily interactions within classrooms provide access to peer resources and create opportunity to interact with peers with different characteristics and background. Traditionally, classroom composition has been conceptualized as the average of student characteristics, such as prior achievement or demographics. However, such operationalization of classroom composition or “peer effects” fails to capture both the within-classroom heterogeneity of classrooms and the differential effects of classroom composition for students of different demographic, sociopsychological, and behavioral profiles.

The three papers of this symposium address these issues and seek to understand the conditions and mechanisms of peer effects within classrooms. The first paper capitalizes on a national dataset of eighth graders attending public schools across the U.S., to describe racial composition of classrooms by student race, as compared to that of their home neighborhoods, and examine its relation to their psychological and academic outcomes. The second paper analyzes teacher reports of student effort and defiance to understand within- and between-classroom variations in teacher perceptions by testing the predictive roles of demographic, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of students and teachers. The third paper makes use of peer-perceived popularity data from eighth to tenth grade classrooms in the Netherlands to examine the role of within-classroom heterogeneity and similarity in popularity in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. The discussant, an expert in socioemotional development and classroom contexts, will discuss the findings in relation to research focused on examining classrooms as social settings and suggest implications in teacher training and school-based interventions.

Sub Unit

• Social Relationships

Chair

• Ha Yeon Kim, New York University

Discussant

• Stephanie Jones, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Integrated Homes, Segregated Classrooms: The Role of Disparate Classroom and Neighborhood Racial Composition in Early Adolescence - Presenting Author: Ha Yeon Kim, New York University; Kate Schwartz, New York University

• How Teachers View Adolescent Students’ Effort and Defiance: Effects of Student, Teacher and Classroom Composition Characteristics - Presenting Author: Erik A. Ruzek, University of Virginia; Christine Rubie-Davies, University of Auckland

• Examining Group Composition Effects of Popularity on Alcohol Consumption Using the Group Actor-Partner Interdependence Model - Presenting Author: Rob Gommans, Centre for Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Christoph Michael Müller, University of Fribourg; Gonneke W. J. M. Stevens, Centre for Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Antonius H. N. Cillessen, Developmental Psychology, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University; Tom F. M. ter Bogt, Centre for Child and Adolescent Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands