Student-student interaction can benefit learning as well as provide a sense of community in online courses. Blogging is a common approach to provide opportunities for students to communicate with each other. This study used Social Network Analysis to depict commenting behaviour between students in an online graduate-level course. By examining the…

At school, pupils often cooperate on common projects and must coordinate their different individual actions. However, grades are pervasively used even in cooperative situations, which make the pupils' differences in achievement and their relative rank salient and may reduce their inclination to work constructively with others. Thus, we…

From a special feature on "Violence & Agression. Other articles in the feature include "Aggression in the Classroom by Fritz Redl, "Temper Trantrums by A.E. Trieschman, and "Anger in Children by George V. Sheviakov.

Possible bases for student influence over teachers are examined. Since teachers cannot avoid being influenced by students, it is important for them to consciously select the kinds of influence efforts to which they will respond. (MJB)

In order to develop an ecological theory of teaching, the classroom must be viewed as a sociological unit. The unit of interest was the teacher-student learning group. The basic question explored was: What is the relationship between human interactions and the physical and social contexts of the group? Teams of scholars met in seminars, each…

CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR SETTING ARE DEVELOPED THROUGH THE USE OF PRINCIPLES AND TECHNIQUES FROM ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. THE ECOLOGICAL SUBUNITS WITHIN A THIRD-GRADE CLASSROOM SETTING WERE IDENTIFIED AND THE QUALITIES OF THESE SUBUNITS WERE SPECIFIED. THE SYSTEM, DEVELOPED QUALITATIVELY, DESCRIBES THE…

This study, employing inclusion, control, and affection as independent variables, tests empirically Schutz' (1958) three-dimensional theory of group process, using a Prisoner's Dilemma experimental analogue situation with dyads. (Author)

Research conducted in the United States has found that people exert more effort when they perform a task individually than when they do so in a group. This phenomenon has been labeled social loafing. To examine the transcultural generality of social loafing, 20 male and 20 female Chinese school children in Taiwan were selected from grades 2, 3, 6,…

Survey data from 1,069 students in a small private college were used to assess why students offer comments or raise questions in class. Results indicate that class traits and student traits explained the most variance; neither professors' gender nor professors' interpersonal style played a central role in class participation. (Author/MSE)

The objectives of this workshop module are to help teachers recognize the power of their expectations to influence the behavior and perception of students, to identify commonly held expectations for the sexes and the self-fulfilling consequences of these expectations, and to examine the inappropriateness of differential expectations based on sex.…

This paper reports on an investigation of the interdependent relationship between ecological classroom dimensions and kindergarten students' task-related classroom behaviors, studied independently of personalities or age-group generalizations. Major purposes of the study were: (1) to identify and describe the main action structures observed in the…

A study examined global- and local-allocational preselection mechanisms for turn-taking in the language classroom, using two corpuses of classroom discourse illustrating both accuracy- and fluency-based modes of language teaching. It was found that teacher-directed accuracy work yielded Initiation-Response-Feedback patterns governed by…

This collection of over 60 readings on the education of students with emotional disturbances is organized into nine chapters. In each chapter, the articles are bound together by the humanistic ties of psychoeducation, which involves a concern for both the inner life and the external behavior. The book aims to make school time effective enough to…