This interdisciplinary research project will investigate the development of children's social networks using real-time observations of classroom behavior. Continuous measurement of children's movements in the classroom will be complemented with automated analyses of audio recordings and human descriptions of social contacts. Children will be followed from toddler through pre-school to pre-kindergarten in order to conduct a longitudinal investigation of the origin and development of their social networks. Interactions will be observed across classroom activities and will include teachers, allowing for a comprehensive model of classroom ecology and gender segregation patterns. The project will enhance understanding about the micro-geography of educational practice to determine how student location is distributed with respect to the pedagogic structuring of classroom space, such as which children visit the book area together. The findings will provide a knowledge base designed to address deficits in school engagement that characterize the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged students who will be participating in the project. Project resources and de-identified data will be disseminated to the research community to facilitate additional discovery.
This project will unite network scientists from physics with developmental and school psychologists to investigate the development and dynamic functioning of social networks. Quantitative network models of social dynamics will be infused with information about the role that child characteristics like gender and ethnicity play in the formation of classroom social groups. Agent-based modeling will synthesize movement and social contact dynamics. Network models will be parameterized with fission-fusion equations to predict changes in children's developing social networks such as the size and gender composition of groups of interacting children. Multilevel models will capture within- and between- year longitudinal changes in sociality for individual children and for the network overall. These complementary models will specify the processes through which children's social groups become progressively larger and more interconnected over development. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
