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The purpose of the present study is to further investigate whether or not those children who are highly accepted by their peers differ in scholastic achievement from those who are not accepted by their peers.

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This qualitative study examines the experiences and attitudes of elementary school students regarding individuals with disabilities, following five weeks of disability awareness instruction. It also evaluates the social validity of disability awareness instruction as an intervention tool based on student perceptions, and compares the use of a didactic teaching approach with one that also incorporates the use of bibliotherapy techniques. The current study is part of a larger study using a pre-test, post-test experimental group design (Teerlink, 2012). Participants included 322 elementary school students. Each class of first through sixth grade students was randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a bibliotherapy treatment group (n = 125), a didactic teaching group (n = 124), and a no-intervention control group (n = 73). Data for this study were collected at post-test only, using a short-answer, open-ended questionnaire administered to all participants, as well as focus group interviews conducted with three to four students from each grade level. Results indicate that age and grade level seemed to have a progressively strong influence on whether students knew someone with a disability or recognized the presence of a disability among those with whom they were acquainted. In their attempts to define what it means to have a disability, as well as to identify specific disabilities, student responses seemed to lean towards observable impairments such as Down syndrome, physical disabilities, and speech/language impairments. The overwhelming majority of participants indicated that they would like to be friends with someone who had a disability and that the most important thing they learned from the disability awareness lessons was to be kind and helpful to those with disabilities. Although the majority of students expressed the desire to be friends with people who had disabilities and clearly recognized the importance of treating them with kindness and compassion, students were equally split on whether or not these ideals were actually being implemented by students in their school. In addition, when students were given the opportunity to describe their own observations and examples of how students with disabilities were treated at their school, they were more likely to describe incidents of conflict or unpleasant interactions rather than recalling incidents of kindness or positive interactions. Students specifically identified communication issues and coping with stressful or frustrating situations as the biggest challenges or fears associated with trying to be friends with someone who has a disability. Students from both the bibliotherapy group and the didactic teaching group seemed to share similar attitudes towards individuals with disabilities and respond with equally positive enthusiasm to the intervention. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This study describes the effects of gender and age on peer acceptance in primary-grade, multiage classrooms at Edith Bowen Laboratory School at Utah State University. The population described consisted of six multiage classrooms composed of male and female students from 6 to 8 years old. The classrooms were approximately balanced by gender and age. Students spent the entire day and received all instruction in the multiage setting. Students completed "Work With" and "Play With" sociometric rating-scale instruments. For both instruments, results revealed the existence of "gender cleavage"--both genders preferred work and play partners of their own gender. In general, age accounted for more variance in peer acceptance scores for older students than younger students. However, eta-squared statistics demonstated that except for 8-year-old males, gender accounted for much more of the variance in peer acceptance scores than age. The correlation coefficient for paired peer acceptance scores for each student on the two instruments was .94. These results support the conclusion that students did not differentiate responses based on "Work With" and "Play With" criteria . Test-retest reliabilities for the "Work With" and "Play With" instruments with a 1-week testing interval were .94 and .92, respectively.

According to motivational theory physical self-perceptions are crucial to the intrinsic desire to engage in physical activity through play, games, and sport. While there has been prolific research with middle primary and older children little is known of the importance of young children's physical self-concept and their motivation to engage in physical activity. This study had three major purposes. Firstly it aimed to examine the relationship between children's self-concept, their attraction to physical activity, and level of physical activity. The second purpose of the study was to examine differences between boys' and girls' self-concept, attraction to physical activity and level of physical activity. The third purpose was to examine the effectiveness of an intervention programme designed to enhance children's level of physical activity.

The analyses in this dissertation were designed to identify 1) whether there is an age effect among three-, four-, and five-year-old preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 2) whether there is a gender effect among preschool children for false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability, 3) whether there is a relationship between false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability in preschool children, and 4) whether there is a relationship between peer acceptance and false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, and deception detection ability among preschool children. Participants were 78 (34 male, 44 female) preschool children of mixed ethnicity who were between three to five years of age. All subjects completed four tasks that assessed false-belief understanding, deceptive ability, deception detection ability, and peer acceptance. Results from the four-way repeated measures mixed-model analysis of variance (2 Gender x 3 Age x 2 False-Belief Understanding x 2 Deception) suggest that there is a task effect, age effect, gender effect, and false-belief understanding effect for deception among preschool children. Children received significantly higher scores on the deception detection ability task than they did on the deceptive ability task. This indicates that young children find deception detection to be easier than deceptive ability. In addition, this also provides evidence that deceptive ability and that deception detection are two separate constructs. This is further supported by the principal components analysis, which extracted two separate components for deception intelligence. In addition, three-year-old children perform significantly lower than four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. However, there is not a significant difference between the performances of four- and five-year-old children on deception tasks. This supports previous research that four years of age appears to be the critical age for the emergence of Machiavellian Intelligence (Peskin, 1992; Peterson, 2003). Moreover, males perform significantly better on deception tasks than females. Furthermore, there is a significant positive correlation between deception detection ability and peer acceptance. Children who obtain higher deception detection ability scores are ranked as being more liked by their peers.

abstract: Previous research has shown that highly empathic children are generally more emotionally positive, sociable, and altruistic compared to their less empathic peers (Miller & Jansen op de Haar, 1997). These traits and behaviors linked with empathy have been associated with positive outcomes such as popularity in the peer group (Decovic & Gerris, 1994). However, a negative relation between these constructs has been found when studied in the context of preadolescence for boys (Oberle, Schonert-Reichl, & Thomson, 2010), suggesting a potential moderating effect of gender typicality since empathy is classified as a communal and therefore stereotypically feminine trait. The current study examines the relation between the constructs of gender, empathy, gender typicality, and peer acceptance in a preadolescent sample, and mixed findings suggest differential effects of empathy on peer acceptance for preadolescent boys and girls. Future research should continue examining these differential effects for boys and girls throughout childhood and adolescence. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Family and Human Development 2015

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