IBSS-L: Continuous Measurement of Children's Behavior and the Development of Social Dynamics

这个跨学科的研究项目将利用对课堂行为的实时观察来调查儿童社交网络的发展。对教室内儿童活动的持续测量将辅之以对录音的自动分析和对社会接触的人类描述。将跟踪儿童从蹒跚学步到学龄前的过程，以便对他们的社交网络的起源和发展进行纵向调查。将在课堂活动中观察互动，并将包括教师，从而建立课堂生态和性别隔离模式的综合模式。该项目将加强对教育实践的微观地理的了解，以确定学生在课堂空间的教学结构方面的分布情况，例如哪些儿童一起参观书区。这些发现将提供一个知识库，旨在解决将参与该项目的种族多样化和经济困难的学生在学校参与方面的不足。项目资源和已确定的数据将被分发给研究界，以促进更多的发现。该项目将联合来自物理学的网络科学家与发展和学校心理学家，研究社会网络的发展和动态功能。社会动态的量化网络模型将注入有关性别和种族等儿童特征在课堂社会群体形成中所起作用的信息。基于智能体的建模将综合运动和社会联系动力学。网络模型将用裂变-聚变方程进行参数化，以预测儿童发展中的社会网络的变化，如互动儿童群体的规模和性别构成。多层次模型将捕捉年内和年间儿童个体和整个网络在社会性方面的纵向变化。这些相辅相成的模式将具体说明儿童社会群体在发展过程中逐渐扩大和相互联系的过程。该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究(IBSS)竞赛得到支持。

This interdisciplinary research project will investigate the development of children's social networks using real-time observations of classroom behavior. Continuous measurement of children's movements in the classroom will be complemented with automated analyses of audio recordings and human descriptions of social contacts. Children will be followed from toddler through pre-school to pre-kindergarten in order to conduct a longitudinal investigation of the origin and development of their social networks. Interactions will be observed across classroom activities and will include teachers, allowing for a comprehensive model of classroom ecology and gender segregation patterns. The project will enhance understanding about the micro-geography of educational practice to determine how student location is distributed with respect to the pedagogic structuring of classroom space, such as which children visit the book area together. The findings will provide a knowledge base designed to address deficits in school engagement that characterize the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged students who will be participating in the project. Project resources and de-identified data will be disseminated to the research community to facilitate additional discovery.This project will unite network scientists from physics with developmental and school psychologists to investigate the development and dynamic functioning of social networks. Quantitative network models of social dynamics will be infused with information about the role that child characteristics like gender and ethnicity play in the formation of classroom social groups. Agent-based modeling will synthesize movement and social contact dynamics. Network models will be parameterized with fission-fusion equations to predict changes in children's developing social networks such as the size and gender composition of groups of interacting children. Multilevel models will capture within- and between- year longitudinal changes in sociality for individual children and for the network overall. These complementary models will specify the processes through which children's social groups become progressively larger and more interconnected over development. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.