Peers, Schools and Technology

• peers are two or more persons who are operating at similar levels of behavioral complexity
• sociability is a person’s willingness to engage others in social interaction and to seek their attention or approval
• intersubjectivity is the ability to share meaning, intentions, and goals with a social partner.
• nonsocial activity is an onlooker behavior and solitary play
• onlooker play is an activity when children linger around other children, watching them play, but making no attempts to join in the play
• parallel play is largely noninteractive play in which players are in close proximity but do not often attempt to influence each other
• associative play is a form of social discourse in which children pursue their own interests but will swap toys or comment on each other’s activities.
• cooperative play is a true social play in which children cooperate or assume reciprocal roles while pursuing shared goals
• play was teaching children from an individualistic culture (the U.S.) to assert their identities as individuals, whereas children from a collectivist culture (Korea) were learning to keep their own egos and emotions under control to promote group harmony
• Carolee Howes (1992) claims that pretend play serves at least three crucial developmental functions: it helps children master ways of sharing meaning with their social equals, it provides opportunities for young children to compromise as they negotiate the roles to enact in their play and the rules that guide these pretend episodes, and it is a context that permits children to display feelings that may bother them, allowing them opportunities to better understand their own (or their partners’) emotional crises, to receive social support from (or provide it to) playmates, and to develop a sens
• peer group is a confederation of peers who interact regularly, that defines a sense of membership and formulates norms that specify how members are supposed to look, think, and act
• clique is a small group of friends who interact frequently
• crowd is a large, reputationally based peer group made up of individuals and cliques that share similar norms, interests, and values
• peer acceptance is a measure of a person’s likability or dislikability in the eyes of peers.
• sociometric techniques are procedures that ask children to identify those peers whom they like or dislike or to rate peers for their desirability as companions; used to measure children’s peer acceptance (or nonacceptance)
• popular children are children who are liked by many members of their peer group and disliked by very few
• rejected children are children who are disliked by many peers and liked by few
• neglected children are children who receive few nominations as either a liked or a disliked individual from members of their peer group
• controversial children are children who receive many nominations as a liked and many as a disliked individual
• average-status children are children who receive an average number of nominations as a liked and/or a disliked individual from members of their peer group
• informal curriculum consists of noncurricular objectives of schooling such as teaching children to cooperate, to respect authority, to obey rules, and to become good citizens.
• effective schools are schools that are generally successful at achieving curricular and noncurricular objectives, regardless of the racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic backgrounds of the student population
• monetary support, class size, extracurricular activities and scholastic atmosphere of successful schools are factors contributing to effective schooling
• When Parten studied the development of social play, she found that solitary play and parallel play decline with age over the preschool years and associative play and cooperative play became more common over the preschool years.
• Watching violent TV can instill in children a mean-world belief, or a tendency to view the world as a violent place where people use violence to solve their problems.
• Another danger for children watching violent TV is that they can become desensitized to violence, eventually considering violence to be an everyday and uneventful occurrence
• A danger of watching too much TV, whatever the content, is that it may contribute to a child’s development of the physical problem of obesity, either in childhood or later in adulthood.