Young school children working together: a measure of individualism/collectivism

Co-operation and group working are key aspects of the National Curriculum, reinforced by recent moves towards redefining the primary school curriculum with a greater emphasis on 'citizenship'. There is little research on individual differences between children's preferences for group and individual working or young children's abilities to work in, and generalize from, group experiences. Furthermore, there are no reliable measures of these factors in children. The study reported in this paper was the first stage in research, the overall aim of which was to look at individual and group differences in young children working cooperatively and competitively in groups and alone. The aim of this study was to develop a new measure of individualism/collectivism and the associated factors: sociability and altruism. Some 152 children from two primary schools in England participated in this study. The mean age of the children was 5 years 5 months (range 4 years 11 months to 6 years 9 months). A new measure of individualism/collectivism based on instruments for use with adults was administered to the participating children. Two stable factors, individualism/collectivism and sociability, were identified and were both found to be reliable. The importance of the measure as a tool for use with other methods for evaluating the effectiveness of group work in classrooms is considered.