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Using Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics

Sociometrics is really quite simple. A survey is constructed. This survey asks children to nominate children they would like to sit with, play with, and/or work with. An example of a great way to introduce the survey to the children would be to say, "I want to redesign the seating arrangments to make everyone as comfortable as possible." One could also ask children who they would not like to do these activities with, although I generally do not recommend this because it can cause anger and resentment if children discuss their negative nominations with one another. After collecting these surveys, a sociogram may be constructed which graphically indicates who nominated whom.

Click here to see a sample sociogram produced by Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics.

With this information, one can identify cliques, class divisions, and get a sense of the overall social structure of the classroom. One may discover racial and/or gender segregation, an intolerance of included children (i.e., those receiving special education services), or homophobia in a classroom. Using sociometrics, one may monitor the classroom interventions put into place to remediate these problems.

The general mental health of a classroom can also be monitored by calculating the percentage of reciprocated nominations, and the number of children receiving reciprocated nominations. This is calculated for you. Basically, the higher the percentage of reciprocated nominations, the more likely the children are to feel that they are an integral part of the classroom community. Research shows that this is important if a child is to reach his/her academic potential.

Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics also uses survey information to identify those who are rejected, neglected (ignored), popular, and controversial (a combination of positive and negative nominations). This is graphically illustrated through a bar graph.

Click here to see a sample bar graph produced by Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics.

After identifying your "target population" (the students with whom you plan to intervene), it is time for you and/or your team to brainstorm and hypothesize why the particular child or children are having social difficulties. Once your team has selected an intervention, Walsh's Classroom Sociometrics can be used to monitor the progress.


Group Seating Arrangements for Cooperative Classroom Environments

Placing children with mutual nominations into a work group will facilitate their willingness to work with one another. It can also make rejected and neglected children feel more welcome. Before distributing a survey for this purpose, tell the students that you want to accommodate their choices as much as possible. After collecting the nomination choices and printing a sociogram and bargraph, see who is popular, rejected, and neglected. The following are step-by-step directions for arranging sociometric groups.

  1. Decide how many groups you will have in your classroom.
  2. On a sheet of paper, draw as many large squares as you have groups.
  3. Take all of your rejected and neglected children and try to spread them out by writing in as few as possible in each square.
  4. Take all of your popular children, and write in as few as possible in each square. Do this while trying to respect the choices of the rejected and neglected children. If you used a negative question, try to respect these nominations as well.
  5. Next, place the rest of the children in each group, trying to optimize the number of mutual choices per group.

While doing this, take academic skill level into consideration so that each group has the same proportion of high, average, and low achievers. After placing children in sociometric groups, direct each group to help one another during your first classroom assignment with such things as getting one another started, spelling, reading a specific word, or explaining a concept. One could also make it a classroom rule that students must ask their group members for help before calling for the teacher. It is generally more effective to direct children to help one another, rather than to tell them directly what to do.