Every class has a map that nobody has drawn: who is chosen, who is avoided, who goes unnoticed. A sociogram draws it. Your students answer for fifteen minutes and the platform does the rest: seven graphs, the indexes of the group and a report for every student.
A sociogram is a photograph of the relationships inside a class group, taken from the only point of view that really knows them: the students themselves. Each of them answers privately, on their own screen, who they would choose for a task, a game or a trip, who they would rather not be with — and, the part that is almost always missing, who they THINK has chosen them and who they think has rejected them.
With those answers the platform rebuilds the whole network of the group: who is at the centre, who lives on the edge, which friendships are mutual and which go only one way, and how far each student is from being right about the way the others see them.
It is not a personality test and it does not diagnose anybody. It measures the RELATIONSHIPS of a group at a given moment, and those relationships change: a sociogram in October and another one in April tell two different stories, and the difference between them is often the most useful information of the year.
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The sociogram is a system test that is already written, tested and translated: you do not have to prepare a single question. From your account the whole process is four steps.
The School sociogram is in the catalogue of system tests: 25 items — 5 choices, 5 rejections, 5 guesses about who chose you and 5 about who rejected you, plus the instruction screens. One click copies it into your account, ready to assign. Every application you generate is an independent copy, so you can run the sociogram again later in the year without overwriting the previous one.
Assign the test to one of your class groups. The platform gives you an access code for the group and freezes the list of students the moment the first one starts, so that everybody answers about the same group.
Students need no account, no email address and no password. They open the home page, type the code you gave them, pick their name from the list and answer. It takes them 10 to 15 minutes, and what each student answers is private: nobody sees who chose whom except you.
When the group has finished, one click builds everything: the seven graphs, the indexes of the group and one individual report for every student. Large groups are processed in the background, so you can close the page and come back when it is ready.
You can pass the same sociogram again a few months later and compare: the group changes, and so does its map.
A single tangled diagram with every arrow in it explains nothing. That is why the platform draws the network seven times, and each drawing answers a different question about the group.
The strongest bonds: the classmates each student names FIRST. This is the graph where the real leadership of the group shows up, and it does not always coincide with the loudest voice in the classroom.
The wider circle of affinity: friendships that exist but are not a first choice for anybody. They are the bridges that hold the group together and keep it from breaking up into closed cliques.
The clearest tensions. These arrows are the ones that most often end up as an incident in the playground, and they are the first thing to look at when a group simply does not work.
Milder rejections. On their own each one means little; all of them piling up on the same student show somebody who is being pushed aside little by little.
Friendship as it really is: I choose you and you choose me. These pairs are the backbone of the group, the ones you can lean on when you have to rebuild a team.
Two students who reject each other. There are usually very few, and they explain a surprising share of everything that happens in the classroom.
I choose somebody who rejects me, or somebody chooses me and I reject them. It is the most uncomfortable position to be in, the hardest to see from the outside, and often the one that hurts the most.
All seven graphs are drawn with a Fruchterman-Reingold layout and a Northway projection: the most chosen students end up in the centre of the picture and the isolated ones on the outer ring, so the position of a node already tells you something before you read a single number. The colour of each node shows the sex of the student, which makes cliques by sex visible at a glance, and every arrow goes from the student who chooses to the student who is chosen.
Before looking at any single student, the report tells you how the group is doing as a group.
The report lists all the students with their sociometric indicators side by side — choices and rejections received and made, perceptions, oppositions, reciprocities — and puts a label next to the ones that the statistics single out: popular, rejected, controversial or ignored.
It is the fastest way to know where to look. From each row you open the individual report of that student.
For every student the platform works out about twenty indicators, grouped into five blocks that answer five different questions:
The same numbers, seen as a map. The student sits in the centre and every classmate is placed on one of four concentric rings according to the affinity between the two: the innermost ring holds the strongest bonds, and the outer ring the classmates from whom there is a clear social distance.
Put the map of a popular student next to the map of a rejected one and the explanation is already there: the first has the group close by, the second has it far away and in the outer ring. Classmates with no measurable relationship in either direction are left out, so that the map stays readable.
Nobody is popular for collecting many choices in absolute terms: six choices in a class of thirty are not the same as six choices in a class of twelve. The platform compares every student with what would be EXPECTED in a group of that size with that number of choices, and only colours the indicator when the difference is statistically significant with 95 % confidence.
The status diagram shows the eight basic indicators as eight octants: blue when the value is significantly high, red when it is significantly low, and white when the student is inside the expected range. The heading of the diagram states the resulting profile.
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From those significance thresholds the platform singles out four profiles. They are not labels stuck on a child: they describe the position that the group has given that student, and a position can change.
Receives significantly more choices than expected, and no unusual number of rejections. Their map shows the group close by. They are the easiest students to spot, and the ones a teacher needs no help at all to identify.
Receives significantly more rejections than expected. The group has an opinion about this student, and it is a negative one. It is visible, it hurts, and it tends to produce incidents, which is precisely why it usually gets attention.
Receives neither choices nor rejections: significantly few of both. Nobody names this student, in any direction. They cause no trouble, they do not complain, and they go through the whole school year invisible. This is the profile that makes a sociogram worth passing: a rejected student ends up in your office, an ignored one never does.
Receives significantly many choices AND significantly many rejections at the same time. The group is divided about this student: they have their people, and they have their conflicts. It is not a middle ground between popular and rejected; it is a profile of its own.
Most of the class will have no profile at all, and that is exactly what should happen: it means those students are inside the expected range. Not labelling is information too.
A sociogram is, by definition, sensitive data about children: who is rejected, and by whom. That is why students take it with no account, no email address and no password; why their surnames are stored and displayed as initials only; why the personal data of the platform is encrypted field by field; and why closing your account really does delete them.
The graphs and the reports on this page come from a FICTITIOUS group, generated on purpose to illustrate it. No real student has ever appeared on a public page of this site, and none ever will.
Creating an account is free and takes a minute. The sociogram is already there, waiting: copy it, assign it to your group and read the report. If you would rather see the detail of every screen first, the user manual explains the whole process step by step.
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