Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL
The social side of school: Why educators need social psychology
Submitted November 9, 2008
Hunter Gehlbach
Keywords: education, learning, motivation, motivation and instruction, student interaction, teacher cognition, teacher-student interaction, teaching
Abstract
Teaching and learning are fundamentally social enterprises. Yet, rarely are teachers and students educated on social aspects of classrooms. On the other hand, social psychologists have amassed scores of empirically-grounded theories and principles that help us to understand, explain, and predict social behavior. This article argues that putting basic social psychological knowledge into the hands of teachers and students would improve teaching and learning in multiple ways. Illustrations from three domains of social psychology – social cognition, influence/persuasion, and interpersonal relations – show how infusing social psychological concepts into classrooms would improve teachers’ pedagogy, student motivation, and student understanding. Pathways through which educational psychologists can begin importing social psychology into classrooms are explored.
Classroom-based teaching and learning are fundamentally social acts. Students learn by interacting with one another. They learn through interactions with their teacher. Even when students read or interact with inanimate objects such as an abacus or vial of solution, much of their potential learning remains unrealized until a social interaction occurs. In these instances, the interpretation of the experience usually takes place once a teacher or fellow student explains what should happen next, what is happening, or what has happened… or, in the case of my own math and chemistry experiences, what should have happened.
In spite of the fundamentally social nature of teaching and learning this aspect of schooling receives relatively little attention. Educational practitioners rarely focus on the social side of school. How could they? There are standardized tests to prepare students for, pay for performance policies to worry about, and achievement gaps to close. Although some educational researchers still examine social facets of the classroom, increasingly they are rewarded for focusing elsewhere. Funding initiatives at the National Science Foundation and Institute for Education Sciences focus on math, science, technology, and literacy, but only rarely on social aspects of schooling. Other scholars have turned towards cognitive neuroscience for insights into how to improve learning (Varma, McCandliss, & Schwartz, 2008). These non-social concerns of practitioners, the targets of these funding initiatives, and the promise of neuroscience are all critically important. While acknowledging the significance of these areas, this article proposes that vast improvements in teaching and learning can be made in the immediate future by focusing on the social side of school. Specifically, putting social psychological theories into practice has great potential to improve classrooms at both the teacher and student levels in multiple ways.
Calls for new reforms within education, like the incorporation of more social psychology into teacher professional development and students’ learning, have abounded over the past century. Frequently, the calls for new reforms recycle old ideas (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Thus, it is reasonable to question whether a plea to incorporate ideas from yet another discipline into education warrants serious attention. Social psychology deserves special consideration for three reasons. First, adapting ideas from social psychological principles for classroom interventions has happened rarely at any large-scale policy level. Unlike many of the reform movements described by Tyack and Cuban (1995), the theories and principles that social psychology could bring to bear on educational problems would be truly new for almost all educational practitioners. Second, because classrooms and schools are fundamentally social, interventions that improve social interactions or interpersonal understanding are likely to have multiple positive outcomes. Interventions may improve motivation, affect, behavior, and learning for both students and teachers. Third, even modest improvements in the social savvy of teachers could produce huge gains. Imagine that an intervention improves a mere 1% of teachers’ interactions with students. Given the myriad of social interchanges that teachers have with often over 100 students everyday (at the secondary level), the thousands of teachers in the country, and the 180 days of most school years, 1% would represent a tremendous number of improved interactions. In sum, because social psychology has the potential to bring new ideas to education, impact multiple valued educational outcomes, and produce surprisingly large impacts from modest interventions, the educational research community needs to seriously consider what social psychological principles have to offer.
The logic of this article is abundantly straightforward. Education is a fundamentally social act. The discipline of social psychology fundamentally examines people as social beings. If educators and students better understood the nuances of the social side of schools, it seems almost necessarily true that teaching and learning would improve.
To explore this possibility, I describe three pathways through which social psychology might help teaching and learning in classrooms. Specifically, I focus on how social psychological principles might improve pedagogy, bolster student motivation, and facilitate students’ understanding of content. I then provide two discrete illustrations of how social psychology has been able to improve classroom outcomes in the past. Next, a key concept from each of three domains in social psychology is examined in detail to illustrate how it might enhance teacher pedagogy, student motivation, or student understanding. In closing, I argue that social psychology deserves a place in the training of educators (in spite of their corpulent list of requirements) and that educational psychologists can play key roles in infusing social psychology into our schools.
How might S ocial P sychology H elp E ducation?
Before exploring how social psychology might help education, a common understanding of what social psychology entails is needed. This task is more challenging than it appears. As Elliot Aronson notes, “There are almost as many definitions of social psychology as there are social psychologists” (p. 5, 1999). Some scholars in the field focus on how people think about themselves and others (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), others on influence and persuasion (Cialdini, 2001), and others on interpersonal and inter-group relations (Devine, 1995). For the purposes of thinking about social psychology’s potential role in schools, Myers’ definition, “Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another,” (p. 4, 2007) covers three critical aspects of students’ and teachers’ daily social experiences. It also adequately covers the core domains of the discipline: social cognition, influence and persuasion, and interpersonal relations.
With this definition in mind, the question becomes how knowledge of basic principles within these domains might facilitate teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. I argue that three pathways to improved educational outcomes can be expected. First, social psychology should help education through teachers improving their pedagogy. Social psychology can offer teachers insight into how students think about certain content, how to persuade them that certain topics are interesting and important, and how different groups of students might relate to the material. Second, teachers with a working knowledge of social psychological concepts should better facilitate students’ motivation. They can help guide students’ attributions about past successes or failures, persuade them to try harder, and better take advantage of the fact that social relationships are intrinsically motivating (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Finally, teachers who are fluent with certain social psychological ideas should be better equipped to help students understand certain subject matter content. Teachers might use social psychological principles to explain how historical figures thought about each other, how characters in a novel influence one another, or how levels of formality in different foreign languages impact social relationships. In short, social psychology provides novel frameworks for understanding the social phenomena embedded in most curricula.
Certainly, other pathways exist through which social psychology might improve classrooms. An understanding of social psychology offers insights into reducing prejudice within schools. These principles also might help students to develop a clearer sense of self or make them happier or give them insights into their own (mis)behavior. This article limits its scope to improved teacher pedagogy, student motivation, and student understanding because they seem particularly promising domains for cultivating multiple interventions, each of which might impact a variety of outcomes.
Past A pplications of S ocial P sychology in E ducation
To gain initial insights into how social psychological principles might be applied in classroom settings, a pair of past examples are illustrative. These illustrations demonstrate how successful some past interventions have been and raise the question (for which I have no answer) of why these types of experiments and interventions have not occurred more frequently or on a larger scale.
Perhaps the most famous and successful example of social psychology in the classroom is that of Elliot Aronson’s (1978, 2000) jigsaw technique. The jigsaw classroom arose out of a need to improve inter-group relations between African-American, Hispanic, and White students in post-desegregation Texas. Although different variations exist, the basic pattern of a jigsaw classroom is as follows. Initially, students are assigned to work on a complex task in a small group which is heterogeneous with regard to race (or some other category). The task is sufficiently complex and requires enough different skills and/or knowledge, that no one group-member can do the task alone. Instead, members of this initial group must divide up and work with other classmates in “expert” groups. In these second groups, students work with specialized resources or develop new skills. Once they develop their unique expertise, they return to their original group to work on the original problem by synthesizing the new knowledge and skills that each group-member has brought back from his or her respective expert group.
The jigsaw technique is supported by several principles and findings from social psychology. First, research from the minimal group paradigm shows that prejudice will arise between groups even when they are artificially and arbitrarily created and the differences between group members are astoundingly trivial. For example, one study created identical groups through random assignment, but produced between-group prejudice by telling subjects that they were over- or under-estimators of dots on a computer screen (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). Second, prejudice research indicates that mere contact between members of different groups is not sufficient to ameliorate the ill-will between them; other conditions must be in place (Pettigrew, 1998). Third, people tend to engage in social loafing when working in groups without individual accountability mechanisms in place (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979).
These principles are embedded within the jigsaw activity in several ways. First, students are members of two different groups during the activity (their original group and their expert group). Because their allegiances are divided between these two groups at different times, the likelihood that between-group prejudices or other minimal group preferences will arise is greatly diminished. The groups are cooperative and interdependent rather than competitive and independent; students enter into these groups as equal status participants; they are striving to solve a common problem; the teacher supports their interactions; and they have the potential to become friends. A cooperative context, equal status participation, common goals, authority support, and “friendship potential” are exactly the conditions that Pettigrew (1998) identifies as facilitating prejudice reduction during inter - group contact. Finally, students are held accountable by their original groups for bringing back information from their expert groups. Because the group relies on the knowledge and skills that each and every student brings back from their unique expert group, social loafing cannot occur without harmful repercussions for the entire group.
The results of the jigsaw classroom are impressive. As compared to control classrooms, students in classrooms that implemented the jigsaw technique regularly experienced gains in self-esteem, interpersonal attraction towards their group-mates, and empathy between students of different races. Perhaps most importantly, the academic achievement of minority students improved without any cost to the performance of majority group students (E. Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979).
Thanks in part to Aronson’s jigsaw classroom, groupwork has been a resounding success within education. Provided that it is implemented thoughtfully and in the context of appropriate tasks, there is abundant evidence that groupwork bolsters achievement among all students and fosters improved interpersonal outcomes among students (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Slavin, 1996).
More recently, Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, and Master (2006) showed dramatic reductions in the Black-White achievement gap through an intervention designed to reduce the degree to which Black students experienced stereotype threat. Early in the semester, these scholars implemented an intervention designed to bolster students’ self-integrity. When they examined students’ final semester grades, they found that the targeted students in the treatment group experienced gains of .26 grade points in the first study and .34 in the replication. Remarkably, they found that these effects carried over to other classes (i.e., students overall grade-point-average) as well. Given that the initial intervention took about 15 minutes and entailed little more than students indicating which of a list of values were most important to them, rating how important the values were, and writing a brief paragraph about it, these substantial increases in grade-point-average seem almost too good to be true.
The authors focused on three assumptions based on past social psychological research related to stereotype threat. First, students are motivated to maintain their self-integrity. Second, negative group characterizations can threaten student’s self-integrity because the groups that students identify with impact their self-integrity (whether these groups are based on race or some other criterion). Third, when these threats are sufficiently severe, students’ performance will suffer. To address this causal chain of events, the authors intervened by helping students in the treatment group to reaffirm their self-integrity. According to the authors, these affirmations helped to reify students’ sense of self-worth which helped insulate them from performance-related stress. This study provides a dramatic example of how a small intervention at the level of students’ social cognitions can result in a large outcome in actual achievement.
By no means are these the only studies that have implemented social psychological principles in educational contexts (see Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968 for another classic example). However, they do represent a range of how both strong, multifaceted interventions and abbreviated, narrowly focused interventions can produce dramatic and consistent effects. They are also unfortunately rare in that they are true field experiments conducted in K-12 classrooms. Other outstanding work has used the power of social psychological ideas to address educational issues though they have removed students from their natural educational context (e.g., Mueller & Dweck, 1998) or relied on higher education populations (e.g., Harackiewicz, Barron, Carter, Lehto, & Elliot, 1997). This article focuses on advocating for more field-based interventions simply because there are fewer concerns about the findings generalizing to classroom settings. However, both approaches help shed light on how we might improve classroom teaching and learning.