Educators read narrative fiction with children not only to promote their literacy skills, but also to support their sociomoral development. However, different approaches strongly diverge in their explanations and recommended instructional activities. Informed by theoretical understandings of reader-text transactions, this integrative review presents three different conceptions about how children learn socially from narrative fiction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudents who are more liked by their teachers tend to be included by their peers and to perform successfully at school. Yet, very little is known whether peer inclusion can mediate the effect of teachers' liking of students on students' academic achievement. Teachers from Grades 5 and 6 reported their liking of each student and academic achievement (N = 1209; 49% females), whereas peers rated the inclusion of classmates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the classroom represents an important social context for the development of out-group attitudes, the current study investigated the role of inclusive classroom norms for students' attitudes toward hyperactive peers. The study included 1209 Swiss children from 61 school classes who were surveyed in the fifth grade (T1) and in the sixth grade (T2) (M = 11.55 years, M = 12.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo understand the conditions fostering positive outcomes of inclusive schooling, this two-wave study examined the role of individual change in trust and sympathy for adolescents' cross-group friendships and inclusive attitudes toward students with low academic achievement. Cross-group friendships, intergroup trust, intergroup sympathy, and inclusive attitudes were obtained from surveys completed by 1,122 Swiss adolescents (M = 11.54 years, M = 12.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Most countries have started to educate students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools, but it remains unclear how inclusive attitudes towards students with SEN can be promoted.
Aims: This study investigated the role of adolescents' friendships and socio-moral competencies for their attitudes towards the inclusion of students with SEN. Specifically, we studied whether adolescents without SEN would develop more inclusive attitudes if they had close friendships with SEN students and if they expressed negative emotions about social exclusion.
Children's judgments about inclusion and exclusion of children with disabilities were investigated in a Swiss sample of 6-, 9-, and 12-year-old children from inclusive and noninclusive classrooms (N = 422). Overall, the majority of children judged it as morally wrong to exclude children with disabilities. Yet, participants were less likely to expect the inclusion of children with mental or physical disabilities in academic and athletic contexts compared to social contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated relations between children's moral judgments and moral emotions following disability-based exclusion and inclusive education, age, and contact intensity. Nine- and 12-year-old Swiss children (N=351) from inclusive and noninclusive classrooms provided moral judgments and moral emotion attributions following six vignettes about social exclusion of children with disabilities. Children also reported on their level of sympathy towards children with disabilities and their contact intensity with children with disabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe authors investigated 7- and 9-year-old children's moral understanding of retaliation as compared to unprovoked aggression with regard to their aggressive behavior status. Based on peer ratings, 48 children were selected as overtly aggressive and 91 as nonaggressive. Their moral understanding of retaliation and unprovoked aggression was assessed by an interview including questions about their moral judgments and emotion attributions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdolescents' social judgments and emotion attributions about exclusion in three contexts, nationality, gender, and personality, were measured in a sample of 12- and 15-year-old Swiss and non-Swiss adolescents (N = 247). Overall, adolescents judged exclusion based on nationality as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender or personality. Non-Swiss participants, however, who reflected newly immigrated children to Switzerland, viewed exclusion based on nationality as more wrong than did Swiss participants and attributed more positive emotions to the excluder than did Swiss participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow children make meaning of their own social experiences in situations involving moral issues is central to their subsequent affective and cognitive moral learning. Our study of young children's narratives describing their interpersonal conflicts shows that the emotions and judgments constructed in the course of these real-life narratives differ from the emotions and judgments generated in the context of hypothetical transgressions. In the narratives, all emotions mentioned spontaneously were negative.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5-year-old, 123 7-year-old, and 130 9-year-old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were measured using two moral rule transgressions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning were investigated. Participants were 235 kindergarten children (M=6.2 years) and 136 elementary-school children (M=7.
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