hich third- and fourth-grade students were trained as conflict managers in order to mediate schoolmates' conflicts.
The mediation training lasted one and one-half days. According to the authors, it focused on providing students with training in communication, assertiveness, and mediation skills.
A content analysis of mediation outcomes was said to indicate that the majority of conflicts were relationship problems involving physical and verbal attacks. Although females brought more conflicts to mediation, physical aggression was used more frequently in male-male and male-female conflicts than in female-female conflicts.
The premediation strategies students most commonly used were physically and verbally forcing the other person to give in. However, mediation was able to offer students a different alternatives, the most common of which was for students to agree to avoid each other in the future.
In some earlier work, Johnson, Johnson, Dudley and Acikgoz (1994) evaluated a peer-mediation training program in four multi-age classrooms in an American, suburban, middle-class elementary school. The sample consisted of 92 students in the first through sixth grades, all of whom received 30 minutes of training per day for six weeks. Training focused on negotiation and mediation procedures and skills.
The authors reported that prior to the training program, frequent conflicts involving physical aggression, playground activities, access to or possession of objects, turn taking, put-downs and teasing, and academic work were reported. However, following training sample subjects were able to transfer the procedures and skills and apply them in real conflicts among classmates.
Indeed, Johnson et. al (1994) reported that:
Careful observation of hallways, the lunchroom, the playground, and the gymnasium revealed that four months after training, subjects seriously and carefully used these procedures to resolve hig...