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通过对课堂行为的实时观察来调查儿童社会网络的发展。对孩子们在教室里的动作的持续测量将辅以对录音的自动分析和对社会交往的人类描述。为了对他们的社会网络的起源和发展进行纵向调查，孩子们将从蹒跚学步到学前班再到幼儿园。将在课堂活动中观察互动，并将包括教师，从而实现课堂生态和性别隔离模式的综合模型。该项目将加强对教育实践的微观地理的理解，以确定学生的位置如何分布在课堂空间的教学结构中，例如哪些孩子会一起访问图书区。研究结果将提供一个知识基础，旨在解决参与该项目的不同种族和经济状况不佳的学生在学校参与方面的缺陷。项目资源和未确定的数据将分发给研究界，以促进进一步的发现。这个项目将把来自物理学的网络科学家与发展心理学家和学校心理学家联合起来，研究社会网络的发展和动态功能。社会动态的定量网络模型将融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。基于主体的建模将综合运动和社会接触动态。网络模型将用裂变融合方程参数化，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组成。多层模型将捕捉年内和之间的纵向变化，在社会性的个别儿童和整个网络。这些互补模式将具体说明儿童社会群体在发展过程中逐渐扩大和更加相互联系的过程。本项目由美国国家科学基金会跨学科行为与社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛资助。

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.