Most children experience some form of grouping in the classroom every day. Understanding how teachers make grouping decisions and their impacts on children’s social development can shed light on effective teacher practices for promoting positive social dynamics in the classroom. This study examined the influence of teachers’ grouping strategies on changes in young children’s social experiences with peers across an academic year. A total of 1,463 children (51% girls, Mage = 6.79, SDage = 1.22) and 79 teachers from kindergarten to third-grade classrooms participated in this study. Teachers rated children’s behavioral problems as the most important consideration when creating seating charts or assigning children to small groups. Promoting existing or new friendships was rated as the least important consideration. Heterogeneous ability grouping, rated as somewhat important by the teachers, was associated with a decrease in children’s friendships and yet also a decrease in girls’ experience with peer conflicts. Our findings begin to fill in the gaps in the literature on the social impacts of ability grouping for young children.

This comparative case study features two small groups of students engaging in collaborative dialog about social issues. Based on social constructivist theories, the two groups were compared across three major components of the small groups system: social dynamics, intellectual collaboration, and teacher scaffolding. Our goal was to holistically analyze these small group processes to understand why some small groups were highly successful while others were not, even within the same intervention and with the same teacher. Successful groups were those in which all students were able to access the conversational floor, many ideas were considered, students were able to share ideas and discuss collaboratively, and students were able to raise multiple forms of social reasoning to support and explain ideas. Change in social reasoning essay scores prior to and after the intervention were also considered as evidence of group success. Results show that teacher scaffolding and existing student processes served to amplify one another reciprocally. The teacher heightened productive social norms when they were present, which then served to encourage productive intellectual collaboration. However, when productive group norms were not present, the teacher took increasing control over the group, which further hampered productive social and intellectual interactions.

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The current study examined the development of early adolescents’ social perspective taking (SPT) through collaborative small-group discussions. A total of 250 fifth-graders were assigned to three conditions, Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR) discussions, Read-Aloud (RA) and Regular Instruction (RI). SPT was assessed before and after the intervention using an action-based argumentation essay task through a theory-driven coding scheme aiming at capturing individuals’ agentic role in SPT and SPT justification strategies. Poisson regressions with Generalized Estimating Equations based on the young adolescents’ essays revealed that CSR peer group members considered more justified perspectives of the issues and provided more justification based on story events and emotional concerns for the perspectives in comparison with fifth graders in the RA and RI groups. Individuals in the RA group generated more emotional justification for their perspectives than RI members. The findings provide insights into the social process of developing SPT under collaborative small-group discussions.

: Spatial information of snow cover and depth distribution is a key component for snowmelt runoff modeling. Wide snow cover areas can be extracted from NOAA AVHRR or Terra MODIS satellite images. In this study eight sets of annual snow cover data (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006) in two mountainous watersheds (A: ChungjuDam and B: Soyanggang-Dam) were extracted using NOAA AVHRR images. The distribution of snow depth within the Snow Cover Area (SCA) was generated using snowfall data from ground meteorological observation stations. Snow depletion characteristics for the two watersheds were analyzed snow distribution time series data. The decreased pattern of SCA can be expressed as a logarithmic function; the determination coefficients were 0.62 and 0.68 for the A and B watersheds, respectively. The SCA decreased over 70% within 10 days from the time of maximum SCA.