About Classroom Sociometrics

To those of you already working in the trenches, you are likely to find that when you bring in a professional-looking sociogram and barchart to an intervention assistance team meeting, your colleagues will be impressed. The key here is to do a few sociograms for various key teachers and then ask your principal or special education coordinator to pay for your fully-functioning version of Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics (purchasing instructions are included in the demo version of the program).

My name is Donald Walsh and I am currently a school psychologist at Cincinnati Public Schools. After taking Dr. Larry Sherman's Educational Psychology 621 course, Classroom Group Behavior, I became interested in sociometry. As a school psychologist, I am often asked to remediate the behavior problems of individual students. Sociometry allows me to not only examine the social status of these individuals, but also allows me to broaden the intervention focus to include the entire classroom. Student difficulties are often systemic or located within the classroom social structure. Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics is the ideal tool for addressing these types of problems. As classroom and individual interventions are taking place, their progress can be monitored with sociometric measures. What's more, teachers love it when you do a sociogram of their classroom. It gives them very valuable information they can use for arranging cooperative classroom seating arrangements.