Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 37, 4th Quarter 2016, Pages 106-117
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms: Contributions of children’s learning-related behaviors, language and literacy skills, and problem behaviors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.04.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Children interact more often with peers of similar learning-related behaviors.

  • Children interact more often with peers of similar language and literacy skills.

  • Learning-related behaviors mediate problem behaviors and peer interaction.

Abstract

Peer interaction contributes strongly to children’s development and learning, but the processes by which peer interaction is shaped in preschool classrooms, particularly classrooms in rural communities, are largely unknown. This study aimed to examine the patterns of peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms as a way to extrapolate how children influence each other in their day-to-day social interaction. Included in this study were 270 preschoolers (Mean age = 53 months, SD = 3.2) from 61 preschool classrooms located in rural communities that primarily served children from low-income families. Results of actor-partner interdependence models demonstrate significant homophily effects of children’s learning-related behaviors and language and literacy skills, after accounting for gender and problem behavior homophily. The similarity of learning-related behaviors between a dyad mediated the relationship between their problem behaviors and the frequency of peer interaction. Children’s language and literacy skills were similar to the skills of their peers with whom they interacted more often toward the end of the academic year. These findings have implications for understanding and improving peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms.

Introduction

Preschool classrooms are important social contexts for many young children, representing an early milieu in which they learn to establish social interaction and relationships with their peers. During this period, young children gradually transition from solitary to interactive behavior patterns (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998). This change in social behaviors provides more opportunities for advancement of children’s social, cognitive, and language skills through peer interaction (Piker & Rex, 2008). While several studies have documented the significant influences of peer interaction on preschoolers’ learning and development (e.g., Bulotsky-Shearer and Fantuzzo, 2011, Henry and Rickman, 2007; Justice, Petscher, Schatschneider, & Mashburn, 2011; Mashburn, Justice, Downer, & Pianta, 2009), how this dynamic social process emerges as a function of preschool children’s learning and development is less understood. Furthermore, most of the studies on preschool children’s peer interaction were conducted in Head Start programs serving low-income children in urban communities or schools serving middle-class families (e.g., Daniel, Santos, Peceguina, & Vaughn, 2013; Delay et al., 2016; Vaughn, Colvin, Azria, Caya, & Krzysik, 2001). Little attention has been directed towards children living in rural areas, where educational resources and facilities are limited and considerably small numbers of households are scattered across a broad region. The purpose of this study was to examine rural preschoolers’ peer interaction in relation to their learning-related behaviors, language and literacy skills, and problem behaviors. In particular, we identified individual and dyadic factors contributing to the homophily phenomenon, defined as a preference for interacting with peers who share similar characteristics with them (Mcpherson, Smith-lovin, & Cook, 2001).

According to the bio-ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), peer interaction is a proximal process, defined as “progress of progressively more complex reciprocal interaction” that “takes place on a regular basis over extended periods of time” (pp. 797), that drives human development. The underlying mechanisms of peer interaction are heavily discussed in several prominent developmental theories. For example, Vygotsky (1978) sociocultural theory posits that children’s experiences with peers, as they co-construct various cognitively and socially stimulating learning experiences, afford them opportunities to deepen their knowledge and social understanding, and to appropriate cognitive and social skills for better adaptation to the learning environment. Bandura’s social learning theory (1971) proposes that a critical learning skill in young children is to learn by observing and imitating others. Piaget (1932) stresses that the symmetric knowledge status between peers allows children to engage in more reciprocal inquiry processes that assist them in constructing their knowledge of the world.

These theoretical assumptions have been supported by many studies from the early childhood literature conducted in urban or suburban preschool programs. For example, evidence shows that interactive peer play has positive influences on young children’s learning and development, such as spatial reasoning (Ramani, Zippert, Schweitzer, & Pan, 2014), self-regulation (Barnett et al., 2008), and social and learning competencies (Bulotsky-Shearer, Manz et al., 2012). Positive experiences with peers at preschool were also found to enhance children’s knowledge of emotion through more frequent opportunities to communicate their emotion with peers (Torres, Domitrovich, & Bierman, 2015). Recently, Mashburn et al. (2009), and Justice et al. (2011) found that children’s language growth was highly influenced by the language skills of their classmates; the peer effects are manifest more strongly in low-ability children than their high-ability counterparts.

A central focus of the current study was to explore how specific attributes of children may be associated with their interaction in preschool classrooms. Prior studies have suggested that the ways in which children interact with their peers can be influenced by the attributes of children as well as their peers. For example, preschool girls tend to demonstrate greater social skills than boys (Chen, 2010). Children with greater problem behaviors or poorer language skills tend to interact with peers less often (Cohen & Mendez, 2009; Hanish, Martin, Fabes, & Barcelo, 2008; Mendez, Fantuzzo, & Cicchetti, 2002).

The extent to which children differ from their peers in terms of these attributes may also play a role in peer interaction. It is commonly observed that children choose to interact with certain peers more frequently who share some common attributes than to interact with less-similar peers within a preschool classroom. This homophily phenomenon has received considerable attention from early childhood researchers in the past decades. Researchers speculate that the children with whom a child interacts most often can have significant effects on the child’s development (e.g., Delay et al., 2016, Martin et al., 2013, Mcpherson et al., 2001, Strayer and Santos, 1996, Vaughn et al., 2001).

The most commonly observed homophily phenomenon is that of gender segregation. The preference to interact with same-sex peers emerges in the toddler years, with girls showing stronger same-sex preferences than boys (Howes & Phillipsen, 1992). Data suggest that over one-half of preschool children interact with same-sex peers, and fewer than 10% involve only other-sex peers in their interaction (Fabes, Hanish, & Martin, 2003). Martin and her colleagues (Martin et al., 2013; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hollenstein, 2005; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, Leonard, & Dinella, 2011) suggest that the origins of gender homophily may come from children’s beliefs that same-sex peers share more common attributes than other-sex peers, children’s perception of gender roles, or the types of social activities that draw children together.

Behavioral homophily, problem behaviors in particular, has also been extensively investigated in the past decade. Hanish et al. (2008) show that children with externalizing behavior problems (e.g., aggressive, disruptive, or defiance behaviors) tend to affiliate with peers sharing similar externalizing behaviors. Moreover, recent evidence from Stone et al. (2013) suggests that children with internalizing behavior problems, namely, directing distressing feeling toward the self and consequently experiencing “sorrow, guilt, fear, worry” (Zahn-Waxler, Klimes-Dougan, & Slattery, 2000), tend to befriend other internalizing peers, after controlling for externalizing behaviors and gender effects. One possible explanation for this finding is that children with these problem behaviors are often excluded or ignored by their typically developing peers. The experience of peer rejection then leads the children to befriend other rejected peers. The more they are exposed to problem behaviors in their peer networks, the more they are at risk for impaired social, emotional, and cognitive development.

To date, the primary interests on homophily effects in young children focus on gender and behavior homophily. It is less understood whether homophily is influenced by other child attributes, such as children’s skill levels in early academic domains. One exception is a recent study by Delay et al. (2016), who found that the homophily phenomenon among young children was associated with their school competencies; specifically, teacher reports of children’s social and learning behaviors were predictive of their social networks. If homophily effects transcend gender and behavior, we might theorize that children with greater pre-academic competencies, for instance, are drawn to interact with children who approach learning similarly.

Important pre-academic competencies develop in the preschool years, and serve as a foundation to future academic achievement in reading, math, and other academic domains (Dickinson, 2011). One of the essential pre-academic competencies is learning-related behaviors (Hyson, 2008), referred to as the behaviors, skills, and attitudes that characterize how a child reacts and adapts to the learning environment. Examples of positive learning-related behaviors include paying attention to the teacher, being interested in exploring new activities, being willing to seek help or accept help, showing perseverance when facing challenges, and collaborating with others. Children who exhibit a high volume of positive learning-related behaviors are more able to profit from learning-related experiences within the classroom (Domínguez, Vitiello, Maier, & Greenfield, 2010). In turn, children’s learning-related behaviors predict early academic development, even when controlling for cognitive abilities (Yen, Konold, & McDermott, 2004).

In addition to the direct relationship between learning-related behaviors and children’s academic achievement, this pre-academic competence has been found to closely relate to children’s social interaction with peers. Coolahan, Fantuzzo, Mendez, and McDermott (2000) found that children who interacted more positively with peers also showed more positive learning-related behaviors and peer relationships. Recent studies further showed that both teacher ratings of learning-related behaviors and positive play behaviors mediate, or can buffer against, the relationships between problem behaviors and academic achievement in Head Start classrooms (Bulotsky-Shearer, Bell, Romero, & Carter, 2014; Bulotsky-Shearer, Bell, Romero, & Carter, 2012; McWayne & Cheung, 2009). These findings suggest that developing positive learning-related behaviors and/or the ability to form interactive play interaction can lower the negative impacts of problem behaviors on academic achievement.

Another type of pre-academic competencies that might determine with whom children elect to interact is children’s language and literacy skills. According to Vygotsky (1978), language is a psychological tool for higher-order thinking. Better language and literacy skills can help children to communicate their thoughts, desires, and feelings with others, have a better understanding of other children’s perspectives, and resolve conflicts more effectively. This has been supported by Mendez et al.’s (2002) profile analysis, which shows that children with more advanced expressive and receptive language skills tend to engage in higher levels of social interaction with peers. Dionne, Tremblay, Boivin, Laplante, and Perusse (2003) found that children with better language and literacy skills are capable of initiating more effective communications with others and therefore reduce the likelihood of displaying aggressive behaviors. Similarly, Doctoroff, Greer, and Arnold (2006) showed a significant relationship between social behaviors and emergent literacy skills. In their findings, preschool boys’ emergent literacy difficulties were associated with more aggressive and fewer prosocial behaviors, and both boys and girls’ emergent literacy difficulties were associated with higher levels of solitary play and more displays of negative affect.

While these studies suggest that children with better learning-related behaviors or higher language and literacy skills would experience more frequent and positive interaction with their peers, children may also interact more often with peers who share the same levels of learning-related behaviors or language and literacy skills. To consider the extent to which this may be true, the homophily of these pre-academic competencies were investigated in this study, focused specifically on children participating in rural preschool programs.

A number of studies have examined young children’s peer interaction (e.g., Barbu, 2003; Schaefer, Light, Fabes, Hanish, & Martin, 2010), but the bulk of this work has focused specifically on young children residing in suburban and urban settings, as referenced in the previous sections. Prominent theories of child development assert the importance of viewing variability in children’s ecosystems – including family, school, and community – as deeply influential to children’s development, such that one cannot be understood in absence of the other (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). There is thus a need for broadening our understanding of preschool children’s social experiences by investigating peer interaction outside suburban and urban contexts (Kainz, Willoughby, Vernon-Feagans, & Burchinal, 2012; Miller & Votruba-Drzal, 2013).

Considerable evidence shows that children’s development within rural settings is distinguishable from non-rural settings. Miller and Votruba-Drzal (2013) reported significant disparities in the early achievement of rural children relative to urban children, with children in rural settings showing less-developed kindergarten readiness skills than children in small urban and suburban locales. Other studies support similar arguments. For instance, using a large, nationally representative data set, Sheridan and Koziol (2014) found that rural children tend to have poorer social skills than children in other geographical settings (city, suburban). There are numerous explanatory factors that help to understand these differences from a bioecological perspective. For instance, rural parents may have perspectives regarding their role in fostering their children’s early academic development that are distinct from urban and suburban parents (Curenton & Justice, 2008). Rural children’s poor social and academic development may also be attributed to limited resources, staff, and technology to buffer against the negative impacts of poverty (Mitchem, Kossar, & Ludlow, 2006), as well as geographic isolation that prevents children from interacting with each other and accessing the already-insufficient resources.

Alternatively, peer interaction in preschool classrooms might reveal some universal patterns across distal contexts because of potentially strong and common proximal influences from peers with whom children interact daily in preschools. Given that research in this field has mainly been conducted in urban preschool settings, whether peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms would reveal unique patterns was tested as an exploratory hypothesis. By examining the nature of children’s peer interaction in rural classrooms, specifically, this work helps to improve our understanding of the experiences of young, rural children and consider how these experiences may generalize beyond these settings.

The goal of this study was to understand how the degree to which rural children interact with other classmates was associated with their own attributes and that of their peers. In addressing this aim, we examined whether children’s pre-academic competencies (individual-level) affected their interactions with peers, and the extent to which pre-academic competencies between dyad members (dyad-level) were predictive of peer interaction, homophily phenomenon in particular, above and beyond the homophily of gender and problem behaviors. Two types of pre-academic competencies were examined in this study: learning-related behaviors and language and literacy skills.

The children involved in this study were enrolled in preschools located in rural, Appalachian communities, and the schools targeted enrollment to children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Children and their peers were randomly selected from a large sample of classrooms to avoid selection biases. We assume that if peer influences are normative, they should be observable in these randomly selected children. The study employed a dyadic data analysis called actor-partner interdependence model (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) to estimate the extent to which individual-level and dyad-level attributes, most of which were assessed at one point during an academic year, related to the frequency of peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms reported by teachers at the end of the year. The frequency of peer interaction refers to the quantity of interaction initiated by a child actor toward a specific child who received the interaction, called a partner.

While prior research on peer interaction of preschool children has typically involved direct observations (Hanish et al., 2008, Schaefer et al., 2010), in this study we elected to use teacher report for four reasons. First, the number of classrooms involved in this study is substantially large and prohibited the intensive observations that would have been needed to identify the frequency of peer interaction among children. Second, research on older children suggests that direct observations and teacher reports yield convergent information about peer interaction (Gest, Farmer, Cairns, & Xie, 2003). Third, preschool teachers are reliable observers of children’s skills (Cabell, Justice, Zucker, & Kilday, 2009) and teachers frequently use ongoing observations of children’s participation in classroom activities as a way to monitor development over time (Meisels, Liaw, Dorfman, & Nelson, 1995). Fourth, previous studies using observational methods to measure children’s frequency of interaction typically observed children in activities with high-frequency child–child interaction (e.g., free play), while overlooking peer interaction in other structured activities. Teacher report might provide a more comprehensive picture of peer interaction across various activities in the preschool classroom.

Three specific research questions were addressed in this study. First, which individual-level attributes, mainly children’s gender, learning-related behaviors, language and literacy skills, and problem behaviors, predict the frequency of peer interaction between a dyad? Second, after controlling for individual-level attributes, what common attributes exist in dyads of children (i.e., dyadic similarity) who tend to interact with each other more frequently, as evidence of the homophily effect? Third, would learning-related behaviors mediate the relationship between children’s problem behaviors and the frequency of peer interaction between a dyad?

Section snippets

Participants

The data of this study are a subset of data from a randomized controlled trial study designed to examine the impacts of a 30-week whole-group language and literacy curriculum called Read It Again-PreK (RIA; Justice & McGinty, 2010).1

Descriptive analysis

In this examination of children’s frequency of peer interaction, the unit of analysis comprised the frequency of interaction between a child and each of his or her peers in the study (e.g., Child 1  Child 2, Child 1  Child 3, Child 1  Child 4). The data set contained a total of 938 pairs of peer interaction: 107 pairs were rated by teachers as ‘always interact,’ 277 pairs were ‘often interact,’ 307 pairs were ‘sometimes interact,’ and 135 pairs ‘rarely interact.’ The average frequency by which

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the patterns of peer interaction in rural preschool classrooms as a way to extrapolate how peer effects manifest themselves in rural children’s day-to-day social interaction with peers. The underlying assumption of the study is that preschool children form social interaction with peers based on a confluence of factors. Rather than focusing on child attributes that are less malleable, such as gender, the current study examined peer interaction as a

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant R305A080459 from the Institute of Education Sciences. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. We would like to thank the research team and the many administrators, teachers, and children without whom this study would not have been possible.

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      The homophily effect of ability has also been reported in the literature. Lin, Justice, Paul, and Mashburn (2016) showed that preschool children tended to interact more often with peers with similar language and literacy skills, after controlling for the gender homophily effect. Moreover, several recent studies also report a disability homophily effect in inclusive preschool classrooms (Chen et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2017; Lin, Chen, Justice, & Sawyer, 2019).

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    This article was reviewed and accepted for publication in Early Childhood Research Quarterly under the editorship of Dr. Adam Winsler.

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