Trajectories of Inattention in the Structure of Social Interaction in a Class

The problem of maintaining order in the classroom is actual for education. During a lesson, a teacher tends to follow the same time for all students, not to allow them to disrupt the lesson, preventing completion of the intended scope of assignments. Despite the strict control, even during the execution of tasks in a class full of life: students interact with each other, even though they know that this interaction is forbidden. This "life" in a class that is not associated with the learning process, is the subject of my research. Using the method of Direct behavior observation, which allows to obtain quantitative data in order to describe different behaviors in terms of the frequency and periodicity, I try to capture the communicative objective reality of a school lesson. I pay attention to the activities of pupils, which characterizes them as not included in the lesson to be distracted by a side activity. Such activity I name “inattention". I fix the data on specially designed forms. Typically, researchers explain student’s behavior by individual student characteristics (position in the social network, race, social backgrounds, etc.), I try to explain inattention by the observable factors (time-interval of a lesson, the type of activity in a lesson, an overall picture of inattention in a class, etc. ). I propose a classification of the manifestations of inattention, consisting of 6 types, and using the method of Poisson regression, build models to answer the question whether the observed situation in the classroom determines students behavior. Analysis was performed on a database, which was compiled on the basis of the filled part forms of observations from visiting 30 classes. The database consisted of 3,300 manifestations of inattention. Each of these manifestations of inattention has been categorized.