Questioned day care center children during free play about their collective activity to determine how the representation of cooperation is structured and what kind of transformation appears during development. Found a developmental trend of representation of group activity after age 2. Results highlight the importance of group and day care center…

Investigated preschool children's behavior during play, focusing on conflicts that occurred during leisure time and comparing differences between children from Andalusia and Holland. Found that Andalusian children showed a tendency to prioritize maintenance of the interaction above personal objectives; Dutch children showed a greater interest in…

This report describes a study which examined group-order managing skills used by early childhood student teachers in Taiwan, how these skills were used, and the level of student teacher satisfaction with these skills. Fifty-six student teachers from a 2-year training program at the National Taipei Teachers College completed an event-recording form…

Findings of a study that examined the relationship between classroom orientation and sociometric patterns within the classroom are presented in this paper. Methodology involved observation of 12 classrooms in Ontario and administration of two survey instruments to 20 fourth-year students. Classroom orientations were categorized as cooperative,…

The study described in this report investigated the effects of two context variables on small-group learning--namely, group size and group gender composition--within an adult learning framework. In the study, the "revolving circle" method was innovated. In this design, one group member is the center of the cooperative circle and all…

This paper reviews some key ideas that have emerged from recent research into administrative practices in education and their relationship to organizational culture. "Culture" is defined as a system of knowledge and conceptions that members of an organization use for giving meaning to and coping with problems that they experience. The…

The most important components of social relationships between pupils are described and systemized. Then the scattered and diverse methods for assessing social relationships are described and analyzed. (PN)

Sketches the background of mobbing (bullying) in the workplace. Analyzes the school related debate on mobbing. Takes into account the structure and interaction related characteristics of the teaching profession. Asks whether these characteristics can lead to a higher potential for mobbing and how this potential should be assessed. (CAJ)

The hypothesis that student groups working under conditions of intergroup competition will adopt different motivational orientation than will groups not in competition was studied using 89 Israeli fourth graders (50 males and 39 females). The impact of prior socialization on group behaviors and implications for cooperative learning are discussed.…

Children between three and nine years of age were randomly assigned to so-called fast or slow teams and were asked to make self- and intergroup evaluations. Five year olds had high self-evaluations, strong in-group bias, and high group cohesion regardless of which group they were in. (BC)

Food and drink are associated with survival and for children and young people the edible landscape represents an essential part of survival in the modern school. Within any institution that "contains" persons over time, such as schools, hospitals and prisons, the organization and control of eating and drinking takes on a particularly…

The research issue in this study is how to structure collaborative learning so that it improves solving physics problems more than individual learning. Structured collaborative learning has been compared with individual learning environments with Schoenfeld's problem-solving episodes. Students took a pre-test and a post-test and had the…

When faced with having to assign a grade to a student's oral proficiency in a small group discussion, how can teachers consistently evaluate each student? Because a student's adeptness at a foreign language can vary from one ability to another, it is unfair to evaluate his or her performance solely by grammatical and lexical accuracy or by any…

This paper explores the presence of "groupism" in Japan; that is, the phenomenon that youth in Japan are seen in groups and very seldom alone. The text focuses on "groupism" and what that means for schooling practices in both Japan and the United States. Cultural comparisons between the two countries examine the typical…

A study of the English of British schoolchildren of South Asian extraction looks at ways of examining the relationship between their English and two ethnic processes, called "interactive" and "reactive". The way in which Network Analysis permits investigation of the interactive process is outlined, and the use of Identity…