Improving student outcomes by discussing social exclusion

A central and important question for educators is how to reduce prejudice and bias among students with the goal of fostering mutual respect and creating friendships that bridge perceived differences. Melanie Killen, PhD, and her colleagues addressed this problem by creating a school-based program called Developing Inclusive Youth for children ages 8–11 years that involves guided reflection and facilitated conversations led by teachers. Evidence shows that children who are excluded by their peers because of the way they look or speak or where they are from experience negative long-term consequences. These debilitating outcomes affect not only the excluded students but also the class environment for all students. In a study described in their article published in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Killen and her colleagues tested whether their program would increase children’s desire to play with diverse peers and reduce reported experiences of social exclusion.

Developing Inclusive Youth provides two types of experiences: (a) an individualized viewing of an interactive online tool in which characters discuss peer decisions about whom to include or exclude in everyday social contexts followed by (b) a group-based class discussion focused on the online scenarios. The 8-week program features a peer from a different group identity (gender, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, wealth status) each week who is the focus of social exclusion in an everyday peer encounter at school, the park, or at home. During the class discussion, the teacher’s role is to be a facilitator. The teacher begins by asking the students to describe what they viewed in the online peer scenario. Halfway through the discussion, the teacher asks students whether they have ever experienced this type of exclusion. When students talk about their own experiences, some students are surprised by what their peers report , while others talk about how similar things have also happened to them. The teacher encourages the class to talk about why these experiences happen and what can be done to change attitudes that reflect bias and prejudicial attitudes.

Killen and colleagues used a multisite within-school randomized controlled trial design, implemented with 983 participants (502 girls; 58.5% White, 41.5% ethnic or racial minority; Mage = 9.64 years) in 48 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms across six schools. The study was conducted in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic, in a large, ethnically diverse public school district in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Children in the program, compared with those who had not experienced the program, were more likely to desire to play with diverse peers and reported fewer experiences of social exclusion. These changes were considered to be a result of the opportunity that children had to share stories about exclusion in a supportive environment. Rather than focusing on individual students, this program takes a group norms approach, whereby the goal is to engage the class in discussions that challenge unfair group norms, particularly ones that perpetuate same-group preferences. As an example, in a discussion about the program’s gender scenario, a girl voiced her distress at being excluded from the boys’ game of soccer at recess when she was told that she wasn’t good at it. When other girls stated that they too had been excluded from playing soccer, the boys asked them whether they wanted to play. Upon learning that they did, the boys asked for some solutions. The class created a new way of choosing boys and girls for teams equally on the playground.

Children’s grade moderated their desire for contact with peers from some but not all social groups. This type of program may be an effective means for increasing positive, inclusive group norms in childhood, because this is a time in development when attitudes and preferences for peer friendships are forming. A fundamental goal for developmental science is to facilitate positive classroom environments for healthy development, productive learning, and academic achievement for all students.

This article is in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area.

Killen, M., Burkholder, A. R., Sims, R. N., Yee, K. M., Glidden, J., Luken Raz, K. V., Kaufman, E., Sweet, T. M., & Stapleton, L. M. (2024). Does intergroup contact increase children’s desire to play with diverse peers and reduce experiences of social exclusion? Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000713

Melanie Killen, PhD, is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology and the director of the Social and Moral Development Lab at the University of Maryland. Her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, is in developmental psychology. With funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, she investigates the origins and development of moral cognition, the emergence of prejudice and bias in childhood, conceptions of social inequalities, and school-based programs to promote mutual respect and fairness. Contact Killen.

Amanda R. Burkholder, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at Furman University. She holds a PhD in human development with a specialization in developmental science and a certificate in measurement, statistics, and evaluation from the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on how children think about social inequalities, the infiltration of prejudice into peer settings, and the development of moral reasoning in intergroup contexts.

Riley N. Sims, PhD, is a photography assistant in the Office of Marketing and Communication at the University of Maryland and a freelance photographer. She received her PhD in human development and quantitative methodology with a specialization in developmental science from the University of Maryland. As a doctoral student, her research area covered gender stereotypes in early and middle childhood in the context of intergroup decisions about the allocation of science supplies.

Kathryn M. Yee, BA , is a doctoral student in developmental science in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. Her research examines children’s understanding of social inequality and its implications for their behavior and reasoning. She has also conducted research on children’s conceptions of wealth status and popularity. The overarching goal of her research is to inform initiatives that help marginalized children overcome barriers to success.

Jacquelyn Glidden, PhD, is a social science research specialist at the National Threat Assessment Center for the U.S. Secret Service in Washington, DC. She received her PhD in human development and quantitative methodology with a specialization in developmental science from the University of Maryland. As a doctoral student, her research area covered children’s theory of mind and resource allocation. She is currently interested in applying statistical methods to conducting impactful research on human development and behavior.

Katherine V. Luken Raz, BS, (they/them) is a 5th-year developmental science PhD student in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. They study children’s understanding of equality in intergroup contexts. More specifically, they are interested in children’s social inclusion and exclusion decisions and cross-group friendships, with a particular focus on those involving racial, ethnic, and wealth status group memberships.

Elise Kaufman, MEd, is a 4th-year doctoral student in development science in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. As a former high school teacher, she is interested in child and adolescent moral and social development in the school context, as well as teachers’ beliefs about discussing social inequalities in the classroom.

Tracy M. Sweet, PhD, is an associate professor in the Quantitative Methodology: Measurement and Statistics program in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology of the University of Maryland. She completed her PhD in statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on social network analysis, network interference, Bayesian statistics, statistical modeling, data science, and machine learning.

Laura M. Stapleton, PhD, is a professor and the chair of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Education Sciences. She specializes in multivariate modeling with complex data structures, including data collected from national probability samples as well as educational administrative data.