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SPRING 2004
School Kids Behaving Badly
by Jennifer T. Daly

School shootings have raised the stakes in understanding and preventing school violence.

For some people, teasing, bullying and name calling are just kids being kids. But even the less-violent forms of aggression can impact kids’ healthy development and learning, according to Arthur Horne. Horne is one of several researchers conducting a national study aimed at reducing aggression and violence in middle schools.

“Our program addresses problems of physical aggression such as hitting, shoving, kicking and biting; verbal aggression such as name calling and teasing; relational aggression such as cliques, exclusion or telling a kid he can’t play with the others; and sexual harassment,” Horne said.

Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the GREAT Schools and Families Program involves teachers, students and parents.

“When we study physical violence in kids, we find that more extreme problems like fighting actually start with less aggressive acts like name calling and teasing,” said Horne, a UGA Distinguished Research Professor of Counseling and Human Development.

The program taps experts from four universities to develop, implement and evaluate a national model for preventing middle school violence. Horne and UGA colleagues — including professors Pamela Orpinas, William Quinn, Roy Martin and Carl Huberty and education program specialist Tracy Elder — have joined forces with researchers at Duke University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Virginia Commonwealth University and the CDC.

“We are assessing several thousand middle school students, their teachers and well over a thousand families,” Horne said. “The expectation is that if the GREAT program works, the CDC will begin national dissemination.”

While hard, fast conclusions are still about two years away, the researchers have plenty of anecdotal evidence that the GREAT program (Guiding Responsibility and Expectations for Adolescents for Today and Tomorrow) is working.

“Teachers have found it useful in understanding students, and parents report an improvement in family functioning and family-school partnerships,” said Orpinas, a health promotion and behavior professor.

The GREAT Program
At the study’s outset in 1999, researchers from the four universities explored violence prevention programs offered across the country. After gleaning the best from various programs, they developed the GREAT program components and began testing them during the project’s second year. In years three and four, the researchers implemented program components in 6th grade classrooms in 37 schools in four states: Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia. All schools were assigned to one of four experimental groups: a school-wide approach (GREAT Teacher and GREAT Student); an approach that targets at-risk students (GREAT Families); a combination of both approaches; or a control group that received no intervention.

The GREAT Teacher component emphasizes the program’s solution-focused tools and provides training for reducing aggressive behaviors and increasing well-adjusted ones. Strategies include alternative ways to set up classrooms, head off problems, defuse conflicts, reduce bullying and improve student-teacher relationships.

“We talk about what’s working, what’s not working and what they need help with. It becomes a teacher support group,” Horne said. “We’ve found that the better the relationships the teachers have with the students, the less aggression in the classroom.”

The 20-week GREAT Student program helps 6th graders develop skills for conflict resolution, anger management and goal setting. Students also practice solving problems, asking for help and making basic decisions for today and tomorrow.

“Great decisions for today might be how you just walk on by when you are being teased,” Horne said. “Great decisions for tomorrow include how you make long-term plans for your life so that you have a goal that helps you prevent being caught up in violence.”

The GREAT Families component identifies students who could benefit from additional help outside of school and works with their families to enhance communication, problem-solving and parenting skills.

The researchers are now at the data analysis stage, examining the effectiveness of their intervention strategies.

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.