Classroom Peer Relations as a Context for Social and Scholastic Development

It has been hypothesized that peers play a critical role in the orientations (i.e., behavioral, emotional, and cognitive) that children develop toward school, and these developments may ultimately influence the ways children participate and learn within the school environment. These underlying processes that link peer relationships and students' achievement appear to have both a direct (e.g., modeling academic skills, facilitating intellectual advances) and indirect (e.g., underlying social and emotional factors) impact on students' academic performance. In this chapter, we consider: (a) four distinct types of classroom peer relationships (forms of relationship), (b) how children develop these relationships (relationship formation), and (c) the means by which relationships affect children's scholastic participation and progress (relationship processes and effects).