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School Kids
Behaving Badly

by Jennifer T. Daly

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Intro/The GREAT Program  |  Helping teachers act early

Assessing School Kids' Behavior

Helping teachers act early

While childhood violence peaks during middle school, aggression and other types of violence-related behaviors, such as shunning and name calling, are already present among kindergartners.

Just because kids display aggressive behaviors doesn’t mean they’ll grow up to be violent. But taunting and other seemingly mild forms of violence can lead to more serious behaviors, said Randy Kamphaus, who heads UGA’s educational psychology department.

Seven years ago, Kamphaus, Horne and Jean Baker, a former UGA educational psychology professor now at Michigan State University, initiated the research program Project ACT Early to give teachers a way to identify at-risk students in the elementary grades. Shorthand for Advancing the Competencies of Teachers for Early Behavioral Interventions of At-Risk Children, the project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

“We needed to develop another classification system because the ones used in schools and clinics focus only on the pathological and are designed to diagnose’ a child with very significant problems,” Kamphaus said.

The research team developed a behavioral typology, or child behavior classification system, based on the Behavior Assessment System for Children. The system uses teacher ratings to group children’s behavior into seven distinct types of adjustment in school. (See chart on page 10.)

Working with teachers in three Athens, Ga., elementary schools, the researchers confirmed and refined the typology’s accuracy for identifying students at high risk for developing violent behavior. (See Summer 1999 Research Reporter.) The team now has found evidence that supports this typology from studies of both urban and rural samples and from various American and international research sites.

ACT Early teachers have embraced the classification system, which also was selected as the primary assessment tool for the GREAT Schools and Families Program.

“Without this classification system it’s like dropping your keys at night near your front door and having only one of three porch light bulbs working,” Kamphaus said. “This classification system gives teachers and schools a brighter light to identify children with needs earlier.”

The ACT Early study offers some good news: The average number of behavior problems in these schools has remained unchanged since the study began.

“This finding flies in the face of public opinion that children are getting worse,” Kamphaus said. “Our data suggest that these problems are stable from year to year. The types of problems may change but the overall level of problem behavior has not worsened, although any amount of behavior problems is of concern.”

The study also shows that behavioral problems abound in elementary schools. “Children have many more unmet behavioral and emotional needs than we had anticipated,” he said.

Their findings have raised another red flag: Children with the highest risk for behavioral and emotional problems are not routinely being referred for services in the schools.

“We are looking for reasons for this particular phenomenon,” Kamphaus said. “My personal theory is that schools in general are not systematically screening children for behavioral and emotional problems the way they do for academic ones. Such screenings are not built into the system and if we do not look for these problems we will not see them.”

Because a child’s behavior over time can slide into the unacceptable misbehaving range, the researchers are expanding their study to more fully and accurately understand, track and predict kids’ behavioral changes. They have begun a detailed study of 49 elementary-age children who exhibit the classification system’s full range of behaviors. For each child, the researchers collect behavioral adjustment information, such as developmental and health histories, as well as classroom observations, teachers’ evaluations and in-depth interviews with the children, their peers and parents.

Not surprisingly, they already have found that a child’s self-review and reviews by peers may differ dramatically from those by teachers or parents. “Some children have told us that emotionally they are suffering in the school setting. They feel stressed around peers. They feel very unhappy. They have low self-esteem,” Kamphaus said.

Meanwhile, the parent and teacher reports of these same children were problem-free.

“It looks to us, based on this most recent study, that children and their peers often are functioning in a context that teachers and parents do not have ready access to, which is very consistent with the reports we’ve had [during] the past 20 years or so of problems children have at school,” he said.

As both the Project ACT Early and the GREAT Schools and Families programs make inroads into understanding school violence, UGA faculty at the forefront of such research continue to seek innovative ways to combat the complex nuances of school violence. Orpinas and her UGA colleagues, for example, recently received a grant from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, a GREAT Schools and Families supporter, to conduct research aimed at reducing bullying among elementary school students.

“When we study the details of so many of the violent kids that are presented in the news, we find that they were kids who were disrespected, teased, bullied and did not get help,” Horne said. “Our position is that violence, aggression or bullying does not belong in our schools or in our families; that all people in our community should treat each other with respect and dignity.”

For more information on GREAT Schools and Families, contact Tracy Elder, project director, telder@coe.uga.edu.

For more information on ACT Early, contact Randy Kamphaus, rkamp@coe.uga.edu, or access www.coe.uga.edu/actearly/index.html.


Jennifer Daly is an Atlanta-based freelance writer.

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