The role of friends in the development of children’s classroom behavioral engagement and peer acceptance in kindergarten: A dyadic approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children’s classroom behavioral engagement and peer acceptance are linked to school readiness and positive educational outcomes. However, these developmental and social processes may depend on the social context in which children evolve. Thus, the friendships children develop in kindergarten may encourage classroom engagement and peer acceptance, based on the friends’ characteristics and the duration of the friendship. The study aimed to investigate how friends influence each other in the development of both classroom engagement and peer acceptance in kindergarten. We also examined whether peer selection and peer influence effects vary according to friendship stability and to child gender. Our sample consisted of 192 kindergarteners from Canada. Students were paired into mutual same-gender friend dyads, 45 of which were stable throughout the kindergarten year. Children’s classroom engagement was measured using teacher reports, whereas peer acceptance was measured using a peer nomination procedure. Data were analyzed using actor-partner interdependence models. Results indicated that friends’ peer acceptance and classroom engagement were reciprocally associated at the beginning of kindergarten, suggesting selection effects. Results also pointed to peer influence effects regarding peer acceptance (but not classroom engagement) when stable friendships were considered. Finally, findings revealed longitudinal actor effects for all dyads, such that when children were more engaged in class, they were also more accepted by peers over time (independent of their friendship stability). Well-accepted children were also more likely to be behaviorally engaged by the end of the school year but only if their friendship was stable. Results applied similarly to both boys and girls. This study suggests that having a stable friend may help children function better in the classroom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".