Studious by association? Effects of teacher's attunement to students' peer relations

We study the role of teacher-perceived friendship on teachers' assessments of their students' learning efforts. Based on earlier studies, we expect that teacher-perceived friendship differs from students' actual, self-reported friendship, and can account for teachers' judgement of students' learning efforts, above and beyond effects of students' self-reported study effort and friendship. Data were collected as part of the Networks and Actor Attributes in Early Adolescence study, which traces the development of individual behaviour, norms, and classroom social structure in 126 school classes (3332 students, 14 schools) during the first year at secondary school in the Netherlands. Students' individual study effort was assessed based on students' self-reports of four effort-related behaviours and as an overall judgement by the class teacher. Students' networks were assessed with the classroom as boundary, on the one hand as students' self-reported friendships, on the other hand as friendships perceived by the class teachers. Results were obtained with multivariate stochastic actor-based modelling of the feedback processes between study effort, study norms, and friendship networks.