Lack of Knowledge Stymies Efforts to Stop Bullying
District Dossier
Despite increased attention to the bullying of school-age children, researchers, school leaders and federal education and health officials say more research is needed to pinpoint effective anti-bullying practices.
Phillip C. Rodkin, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told the Department of Education’s first summit on bullying prevention Wednesday that the reason school officials and other adults don’t know more about bullying is simple: “They didn’t ask. They didn’t want to know.”
He said adults need to spend more time talking to children about the social ecology of relationships to understand who is being bullied by whom and what factors in the school—including classroom management—create conditions for bullying relationships to persist.
One challenge that a number of presenters brought up at the Washington, D.C., summit was the lack of agreement about what constitutes bullying. Bullying is defined in some of the 43 state laws banning it, but the definition varies, as does the way researchers ask students and others about incidences of bullying and other aggressive behavior in schools.
Read the full article here and learn about the bullying prevention summit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, new campaigns/programs for anti-bullying, and the challenges of effectively tackling bullying in a spectrum of fields.
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