This is a point that bears repeating, says Florida Atlantic University’s Brett Laursen, editor in chief of the International Journal of Behavioral Development : “There is a massive gap between being friended and friendless,” he says, and “studies that are as close to causation as you can get” show that becoming friendless produces a meaningful decline in mental health. Students with no friends “receive lower grades and are less academically engaged compared to those with even just one friend,” reported Jaana Juvonen, a psychology professor at UCLA, and her colleagues in a 2019 issue of the journal Educational Psychologist. Second, friendships in elementary school can be harnessed to drive academic growth. First, social-emotional benefits and academic ones don’t operate in isolation. Yet recent research has confirmed two things many teachers have long believed to be true. Even when the value of strong social ties gained recognition, friendships stood to the side conceptually, as developmentally important but not germane to academics. Through that lens, friends in elementary school appeared to be a negative, an impediment to focus and a catalyst for disruption. For years, education research focused on time-on-task as a measure of effective instruction, says Scott Gest, a professor at the University of Virginia.
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