Network Perception

My research suggests that variation in teacher-student agreement on classroom social networks can be explained, in part, by developmental factors (e.g., grade level), classroom characteristics (e.g., size) and teacher practices (e.g., classroom organization).  This is important because past research suggests that teachers who are attuned to their students’ relationships may be better able to monitor bullying and facilitate positive behaviors in their classrooms. Colleagues and I have also explored whether children accurately perceive classroom peer relationships in middle childhood. For example, we found that children correctly infer their classmates’ friends about 80% of the time, but that their inferences overestimate the importance of gender. Although using gender as a cue provides an easy cognitive shortcut for making inferences about others’ friendships, it can lead to errors in judgment, which can compromise children’s ability to navigate classroom peer relationships. We also found that children varied substantially in the accuracy of their perceptions of classroom relationships. Some children (i.e., girls, children in higher grades, and children in smaller classrooms) were more accurate observers of classroom relationships than others. Moreover, certain classroom relationships (i.e., those that involved same gender, high popularity, or similar popularity peers) were more accurately observed. In the future, I'd like to extend my work in this area from cross-sectional to longitudinal studies in order to understand how network perceptions of classroom relationships develop over time.