Educators have long been aware of the potent force of peer influence. This article presents a program in which students can feel important and worthwhile in useful ways by becoming involved with other students, such as leading a small group or in working with students individually. (Author)

Sources in this annotated bibliography are compiled for investigators in speech communication and social sciences interested in the influence of the group on the individual member (conformity and deviation), and for those interested in group consensus formation and the consequences of pressure to uniformity (polarization). The 34 citations include…

Describes an in-class exercise using students' discussion of their answers on a multiple choice test to demonstrate the powerful effects and pervasiveness of social influence. After a brief multiple choice test, students discuss their answers with their neighbors and then answer again. Similar response patterns emerge among the participants. (MJP)

Twenty learning-handicapped and 20 nonhandicapped intermediate-grade children worked on a mathematics problem-solving task on a microcomputer. Their social and instructional interactions were compared as group configuration (individual, homogeneous dyad, and heterogeneous dyad) and task difficulty changed. The computer's effect on the conversation…