The relationship between peer status and students’ participation in classroom discourse

ABSTRACT

To intensify students learning, it is important to understand why individual students participate in classroom discourse differently. So far, there is no empirical evidence illustrating how student participation is affected by the fact that students achieve certain peer status among their classmates. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between peer status and students’ participation. We analyse data gathered via structured observation of classroom discourse and through a standardised sociometric questionnaire establishing peer status on the bases of its two dimensions: peer likeability and social dominance. The sample consisted of 639 ninth-grade students from 32 Czech classrooms. This study shows that the effects of both dimensions on students’ participation are contrary. The regression model shows that the effect of dominance on participation is stronger and is directly proportional: students who are perceived as more dominant participate more. The interconnectedness of peer status and participation intensifies among students with lower academic achievement.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• classroom discourse
• peer status
• likeability
• dominance

Article Highlights

• Students’ peer status intervenes with their participation in classroom discourse.

• Dominance and likability influence students’ participation in contrary ways.

• Students with a high level of dominance participate more while higher degrees of likability decrease participation.

• The interconnectedness of peer status and participation intensifies among students with lower academic achievement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Yet, this intended interpretation does not need to match with the one that the audience construes. For further explanation, see Chatman’s (2008) research on the implied author.

2. The CSI is a key central institution in the evaluation of the education system in the Czech Republic which distributes and evaluates standardised tests focused on different areas of student learning to measure student achievement in Czech schools.

3. ISEI is an acronym for International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status. The index captures the attributes of occupations that convert parents’ education into income.

4. The first quartile includes the most liked and the most dominant students.

5. Since the dependent variable is positively skewed, we employed two other ways of regression modelling to verify the robustness of our results, binary logistic regression and Poisson regression. All the models produce very similar results.

6. Here we present only standardised regression coefficients whose size can be compared irrespective of the range of the comparison scale.

Additional information

Funding

This article is an output of the project On the Relationship between Characteristics of Classroom Discourse and Student Achievement (GA17-03643S) funded by the Czech Science Foundation; Grantová agentura České republiky [GA17-03643S].

Notes on contributors

Zuzana Šalamounová

Zuzana Šalamounová is an assistant professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Educational Sciences. Her research interests are dialogic teaching and teachers´ professional development.

Petr Fučík

Petr Fučík is an assistant professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology. His research interests are educational inequalities, family structures and shared custody.