The purpose of this study was to gather evidence on the relationship between discipline and the control of victimization in schools and to investigate the effectiveness of humanistic versus coercive disciplinary measures. Survey data were obtained from students, teachers, and principals in each of the 44 junior and senior high schools in a county in Ohio that agreed to participate in the study. The data represent roughly a six-month time frame. Students in grades 7 through 12 were anonymously surveyed in February 1994. The Student Survey (Part 1) was randomly distributed to approximately half of the students in all classrooms in each school. The other half of the students received a different survey that focused on drug use among students (not available with this collection). The teacher (Part 2) and principal (Part 3) surveys were completed at the same time as the student survey. The principal survey included both closed-ended and open-ended questions, while all questions on the student and teacher surveys were closed-ended, with a finite set of answers from which to choose. The three questionnaires were designed to gather respondent demographics, perceptions about school discipline and control, information about weapons and gangs in the school, and perceptions about school crime, including personal victimization and responses to victimization. All three surveys asked whether the school had a student court and, if so, what sanctions could be imposed by the student court for various forms of student misconduct. The student survey and teacher surveys also asked about the availability at school of various controlled drugs. The student survey elicited information about the student's fear of crime in the school and on the way to and from school, avoidance behaviors, and possession of weapons for protection. Data were also obtained from the principals on each school's suspension/expulsion rate, the number and type of security guards and/or devices used within the school, and other school safety measures. In addition to the surveys, census data were acquired for a one-quarter-mile radius around each participating school's campus, providing population demographics, educational attainment, employment status, marital status, income levels, and area housing information. Also, arrest statistics for six separate crimes (personal crime, property crime, simple assault, disorderly conduct, drug/alcohol offenses, and weapons offenses) for the reporting district in which each school was located were obtained from local police departments. Finally, the quality of the immediate neighborhood was assessed by means of a "windshield" survey in which the researchers conducted a visual inventory of various neighborhood characteristics: type and quality of housing in the area, types of businesses, presence of graffiti and gang graffiti, number of abandoned cars, and the number and perceived age of pedestrians and people loitering in the area. These contextual data are also contained in Part 3.

This project seeks to to provide clear and comprehensive answers to the questions that plague researchers on how school violence impacts future student outcomes. To that end, the principal investigators plan to review, organize, and synthesize extant research on consequences of school violence and aggression for perpetrators and victims by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis on longitudinal studies of school violence and outcomes. The primary goal of the current study is to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the extant longitudinal research literature on the consequences of school violence.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a comprehensive, research-based framework of recommended practices for integrating police into the educational environment. This research tested use of a multi-faceted school-based law enforcement (SBLE) framework to determine how the framework contributes to multiple outcomes. The objectives for this study were to: (1) implement a randomized controlled trial to test a comprehensive framework for SBLE involving 25 middle and high schools; (2) assess the impacts of this framework on student victimization and delinquency, use of exclusionary discipline practices (e.g., suspension, expulsion), school climate measures, and student-officer interactions; and (3) disseminate tangible findings that can immediately be translated into practice and further research in schools nationwide.

Funded by the National Institute of Justice, and in collaboration with the Flippen Group, the South Carolina Department of Education, and the districts of Charleston, Georgetown, Greenville, and Richland County Schools, WestEd conducted a randomized controlled trial of violence prevention and a school climate improvement program known as Capturing Kids' Hearts Campus by Design (CKH). CKH is a skill intensive, systematic process, whole-school intervention, designed to strengthen students' connectedness to school through enhancing protective factors (strong bonds with teachers, clear rules of conduct that are consistently enforced) and targeting modifiable risk factors (inappropriate behavior, poor social coping skills). The CKH training program aims to address the mechanisms and processes of social skills instruction that lead to improved student behavior by promoting skills acquisition (i.e., modeling, coaching, and behavioral rehearsal), enhancing skills performance, removing competing behavior, and facilitating maintenance of social skills. Components of CKH have been widely used throughout the United States. As of 2013, CKH training has been offered to over 200,000 staff in more than 7,000 schools. Although widely used, the whole package of CKH training and service has not been sufficiently subjected to a rigorous evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the program. The purpose of this study is to test and evaluate the Capturing Kids' Hearts package of programs and processes offered in the school-wide model, CKH Campus by Design, which includes Capturing Kids' Hearts, Process Champions-Plus, Campus TrAction Pacs, Teen Leadership, CKH Recharged, and Leadership Blueprint.

This study focuses on bullying prevention in classroom context. An approach was used to address bullying in the classroom through an adapted version of the Classroom Check-up coaching model, which is combined with a mixed-reality simulator called TeachLivE to build teacher skills in preventing, detecting, and responding to bullying.

This study of violent incidents among middle- and high-school students focused not only on the types and frequency of these incidents, but also on their dynamics -- the locations, the opening moves, the relationship between the disputants, the goals and justifications of the aggressor, the role of third parties, and other factors. For this study, violence was defined as an act carried out with the intention, or perceived intention, of physically injuring another person, and the "opening move" was defined as the action of a respondent, antagonist, or third party that was viewed as beginning the violent incident. Data were obtained from interviews with 70 boys and 40 girls who attended public schools with populations that had high rates of violence. About half of the students came from a middle school in an economically disadvantaged African-American section of a large southern city. The neighborhood the school served, which included a public housing project, had some of the country's highest rates of reported violent crime. The other half of the sample were volunteers from an alternative high school attended by students who had committed serious violations of school rules, largely involving illegal drugs, possession of handguns, or fighting. Many students in this high school, which is located in a large city in the southern part of the Midwest, came from high-crime areas, including public housing communities. The interviews were open-ended, with the students encouraged to speak at length about any violent incidents in school, at home, or in the neighborhood in which they had been involved. The 110 interviews yielded 250 incidents and are presented as text files, Parts 3 and 4. The interview transcriptions were then reduced to a quantitative database with the incident as the unit of analysis (Part 1). Incidents were diagrammed, and events in each sequence were coded and grouped to show the typical patterns and sub-patterns in the interactions. Explanations the students offered for the violent-incident behavior were grouped into two categories: (1) "justifications," in which the young people accepted responsibility for their violent actions but denied that the actions were wrong, and (2) "excuses," in which the young people admitted the act was wrong but denied responsibility. Every case in the incident database had at least one physical indicator of force or violence. The respondent-level file (Part 2) was created from the incident-level file using the AGGREGATE procedure in SPSS. Variables in Part 1 include the sex, grade, and age of the respondent, the sex and estimated age of the antagonist, the relationship between respondent and antagonist, the nature and location of the opening move, the respondent's response to the opening move, persons present during the incident, the respondent's emotions during the incident, the person who ended the fight, punishments imposed due to the incident, whether the respondent was arrested, and the duration of the incident. Additional items cover the number of times during the incident that something was thrown, the respondent was pushed, slapped, or spanked, was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else, was beaten up, cut, or bruised, was threatened with a knife or gun, or a knife or gun was used on the respondent. Variables in Part 2 include the respondent's age, gender, race, and grade at the time of the interview, the number of incidents per respondent, if the respondent was an armed robber or a victim of an armed robbery, and whether the respondent had something thrown at him/her, was pushed, slapped, or spanked, was kicked, bit, or hit with a fist or with something else, was beaten up, was threatened with a knife or gun, or had a knife or gun used on him/her.

The purpose of this systematic review was to assess the effectiveness of school-based anti-bullying programs in reducing school bullying. The following criteria were used for the inclusion of studies in the systematic review: the study described an evaluation of a program designed specifically to reduce school (kindergarten to high school) bullying; bullying was defined as including: physical, verbal, or psychological attack or intimidation that is intended to cause fear, distress, or harm to the victim; and an imbalance of power, with the more powerful child (or children) oppressing less powerful ones; bullying (specifically) was measured using self-report questionnaires, peer ratings, teacher ratings, or observational data; the effectiveness of the program was measured by comparing students who received it (the experimental condition) with a comparison group of students who did not receive it (the control condition). There must have been some control of extraneous variables in the evaluation by (1) randomization, or (2) pre-test measures of bulling, or (3) choosing some kind of comparable control condition; published and unpublished reports of research conducted in developed countries between 1983 and 2009 were included; and it was possible to measure the effect size. Several search strategies were used to identify 89 anti-bully studies meeting the criteria for inclusion in this review: researchers searched for the names of established researchers in the area of bullying prevention; researchers conducted a keyword search of 18 electronic databases; researchers conducted a manual search of 35 journals, either online or in print, from 1983 until the end of May 2009; and researchers sought information from key researchers on bullying and from international colleagues in the Campbell Collaboration. Studies included in the review were coded for the following key features: research design, sample size, publication date, location of the study, average age of the children, and the duration and intensity of the anti-bullying program for both the children and the teachers.

The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study sought to understand the impact of comprehensive bullying prevention programs on outcomes related to violence, safety, and bullying rates. This study focused on 24 middle schools (grades 6 to 8) in Wisconsin. To examine the effectiveness of the school's current anti-bullying program, the Bullying Prevention Program Assessment tool (BPPAT) was completed at the end of the school year. The BPPAT focused on administrative policy and procedures geared towards students, faculty, parents, or administrators. This tool examined the following items: policy and procedures, program implementation, staff training, parental education and communication, student training, reporting systems, and continuous quality improvement (CQI). Students and faculty were given surveys to determine bullying rates and perceptions of school safety. The school safety survey was given to all students concerning their bullying victimization and perception of school safety. This survey contains the following demographic variables: age, sex, grade, and race. The verified bullying incident data contains incident reporting from faculty, which focused on the type of bullying and the demographics of the perpetrator and victim. After new bullying prevention programs were implemented, students were given the safety and bullying victimization survey which focused on perceptions of bullying and school safety. The number of bullying incidents, number of student victims and perpetrators, and the demographic characteristics of victims and perpetrators were retained in aggregate form for each school were submitted to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) for analysis.

This is a multi-method study of school violence and victimization during the transition to high school. This study has two major data collection efforts. First, a full population survey of 7th through 10th grade students across 10 Flint Community Schools (fall 2016) -- which serve primarily African American and poor populations -- that will identify patterns of student victimization, including the location and seriousness of violent events, and examine the connections between school and community violence. This will be followed by a three-wave panel qualitative study of 100 students interviewed every 6 months beginning in the spring of their 8th grade year (spring 2017) and continuing through their 9th grade year. The goal of the interviews will be to further the research from the survey and develop a deeper understanding of how school safety impacts the transition experience, school violence, including how communities conflict impacts school safety, and what youth do to protect themselves from school-related victimization. Researchers integrated crime incident data from the Flint police department as a source for triangulation of findings. A community workgroup will provide guided translation of findings generated from mixed-methods analyses, and develop an action plan to help students successfully transition to high school. Results and policy implications will be given to practitioner, researcher, and public audiences through written, oral, and web-based forums. De-identified data will be archived at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.