Although it can be said that friends play a vital role in any person’s life, University researchers have found that a person’s friends may also be a significant factor in his or her academic performance.
According to a study conducted by University researchers Thomas Dishion and Marie-Helene Veronneau, the types of friends that children make during their middle school years may foreshadow future academic successes or troubles later in their lives.
The study, which will appear in the Journal of Early Adolescence’s February 2011 issue, revealed that both boys and girls who made friends with children who respected rules succeeded academically in the classroom at a rate that was greater than their counterparts who made friends with students who exhibited problematic behaviors. The results emerged from a longitudinal study of 1,278 students in which researchers compared the behavioral and academic records of each student’s three best friends whom they named at the beginning of the study.
“Middle school is very peculiar, because kids go through a lot of transitions at the same time,” said Veronneau, a courtesy research associate at the University’s Child and Family Center. “Often times children change schools, buildings and are in a new physical environment, so one challenge is that the social familiarity is gone; there’s a lot of kids from other schools that they don’t know and perhaps — somewhere along the way — their best friends from elementary school don’t follow them to the same middle school for different reasons.”
Terry Scherer, a school counselor at Springfield’s Agnes Stewart Middle School, also noted that students undergo a large array of biological changes as they transition in puberty, which may affect their performance in the classroom.
“It’s a real upheaval of their brainwaves, so it can even be a traumatic time for some kids but not all kids,” Scherer said. “Academically, a lot of kids struggle at this age and try to find where they fit, and a lot of that has to do with their friendships, because that can override academics for them.”
Veronneau agreed and noted that these biological changes during a child’s middle school years allows them to discern their identity and in what social contexts they may be best suited for.
“When children become adolescents, their brain matures and they become able to have a better understanding of the whole situation,” Veronneau said. “They become aware that within their school there are cliques of students with various types of interests, and they become more privy as to where they fit in there and who are the people they want to hang out with.”
Dishion, a research scientist at the University’s Child and Family Center, said the longitudinal study, which also analyzed students’ peer relationships at the ages of 13, 15 and 17 in relation to their future life adjustments at the age of 24, revealed that peer relationships formed at the age of 13 had the greatest effect on a child’s life as they grew older.
In addition, the study revealed that girls who struggled academically in elementary school continued to struggle in middle school when their chosen friends were making higher grades, while those girls who were already succeeding academically in elementary school continued to succeed in middle school if their friends also had higher grades. Boys’ academic performance, on the other hand, revealed no correlation between their friends’ grades and their own.
“It is possible that girls who have their high achieving friends and may not be doing well may become more easily discouraged about school work, view themselves more negatively and perhaps develop self-esteem and self-deficiency problems,” Veronneau said.
For children who have problem behaviors, Veronneau said a change to a child’s environment may trigger such behaviors and suggested that small adjustments at school may solve the problem, such as the creation of incentives that reward proper behavior.
“I think that problem behaviors are often something that can be dealt with by professionals,” Veronneau said. “It’s usually not the child who has a problem, but it’s usually a reaction to the environment that triggers the behavior. When parents and school collaborate together in creating a better environment that will not trigger the problem behavior, that should usually help those children.”
Sherer also said parents should be involved in their children’s lives during middle school years by taking certain steps, such as checking on their child’s grades, encouraging their children to participate in school-sponsored activities and continuing to supervise their children despite the fact that they may be developing a greater sense of maturity and independence.
“Parents need to be more vigilant of their children in middle school than ever before,” Sherer said. “If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.”
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University researchers find correlation between friendship and academic performance
Daily Emerald
January 18, 2011
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