Friendships and the Academic Skills and Behaviors of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: The Importance of Classroom Social Contextual Factors

The PI will conduct a longitudinal study with three cohorts of students with or at risk for EBD in grades K–3 who are recruited and screened for EBD as part of a larger ongoing IES-funded efficacy study. In each of the first 3 years of the project, 12 teachers and 3 of each of their students with or at risk for EBD will be recruited to participate (for a total of 108 students across 36 classrooms). Only students from the control group of the larger efficacy study will be recruited. At three time points over the course of the school year, the PI will collect data on students' friendships as well as peer (peer rejection, group norms, and social hierarchy) and teacher (interactions with students, general instructional practices, and social attunement) malleable factors. Data on students' friendships (both reciprocated and unreciprocated), peer rejection, classroom social hierarchy, and peer group norms will be assessed through peer nomination procedures and students with or at risk for EBD will report on the quality of their friendships. Teachers' social attunement will be measured through social cognitive mapping procedures and will indicate how well teachers are able to identify the students' friendship groups in comparison to the students' responses. In addition, observational and survey data collected at two timepoints as part of the larger study will also be used to supplement the data collected by the PI. Specifically, data on teacher-student interactions and teachers' instructional practices will be collected through direct observations, teachers will report on students' social and behavioral functioning, and students' academic achievement will be measured through a direct assessment. The PI will use social network analysis to describe the friendships among students with or at risk for EBD and path models to assess relationships between friendships and educational outcomes and between malleable peer and teacher factors and students' friendships.