Preschool children’s grouping: the role of social context.

During preschool age, children make their social experience mainly in two contexts, family and class (Hinde, 1974; 1987). Within the class, children, while playing or making activities, compose different kinds of groups (single, dyads, triads, or large groups). Although the group issue has been considered critical at older ages e.g. during adolescence, ethological studies (Strayer & Santos, 1996; McGrew, 1972; Barbu, 2003) have underlined that the group is a core theme since early ages. However, relatively few empirical data have been collected on preschool grouping within the class. The goal of this research is to describe the types of groups built by preschool children in the naturalistic setting of the class. In particular, our study aimed at understanding whether the kind of situation (child led vs teacher led) affects the number of participants per group, the size of the group and the affiliation in the group according to gender. Method Data were collected in 6 Italian preschool settings homogeneous for the age of the children, from the end of the second year (mean age 4.5) to the end of the third school year (mean age 5.5). The mapping methodology, developed by Peter Kutnick (Kutnick, Blatchford, & Baines, 2002) was used to obtain, as a snapshot, a map of the groups present in the class. A total of 77 mappings were collected with 515 groups: 133 teacher-led and 382 child-led. Results and discussion The results showed that groups were larger in the teacher led than in the child led situation and that when teachers lead the children’s social experience large groups with mixed gender are formed more frequently. By contrast, when children lead their social experience, they make smaller groups (solitary and dyads), frequently with peers of the same gender. Therefore, the context (teacher vs child led) should be taken into account in order to fully understand children’s social experience in school grouping.