Professional Documents
Culture Documents
School Psychology Quarterly 2014v29n3pp233-237
School Psychology Quarterly 2014v29n3pp233-237
Sabina K. Low
Shane R. Jimerson
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Research findings from largely cross-sectional investigations has suggested that classroom practices, teacher attitudes, and the
broader school environment play a critical role
in understanding the nature and prevalence of
aggression, bullying, and victimization. Although there are many different definitions of
school climate, it is consistently described as
the character and quality of the school culture or
the overall ethos (i.e., milieu) of the environ-
233
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
234
sequences (Yoon & Kerber, 2003) and it reduces trust between students and staff.
However, studies of the impact of teacher attitudes or behaviors and students experiences
with aggression and victimization are limited
and do not generally employ longitudinal or
multilevel designs, which are necessary to account for shared variance and nested data.
The articles in this special topic section emphasize a departure from a focus on student
attitudes and behaviors, to a social-contextual
approach that appreciates how features or subsystems within the school environment can mitigate or perpetuate aggression. This special issue is predicated on the notion that school-based
aggression is a reflection of the complex, nested
ecologies that constitute a schools culture
and thus, is best understood through an ecological framework. Despite this, current scholarship on this topic has too often been characterized by studies that capture only one dimension
of climate or a singular perspective, which fail
to account for the dependencies among subsystems within a school, leaving many questions
for the field. Given that school climate is a
multidimensional construct, reflecting different
social contexts, it is important to unpack the
most salient aspects of a school culture that are
associated with peer aggression and victimization. This requires the use of measures that yield
reliable and valid indexes of school climate and
multilevel statistical approaches that model the
nested nature of students in classrooms and
schools. Only then can we parse out those aspects that are to be targeted in professional
development training and school-wide prevention efforts. Also, in light of the plethora of
prevention programming around bullying and
violence, it is important to understand how the
school environment can modify or shape the
efficacy of prevention efforts.
Articles Featured in This Issue
Each of the articles in this special topic section include measures of school environment
and school climate that range from brief measures (Konold et al., 2014) to surveys that assess
a single dimension of climate (e.g., Wang et al.,
2014) to a wide range of characteristics of the
environment (Espelage, Bosworth, & Simon,
2014; Low & VanRyzin, 2014). It is important
to have both brief and comprehensive measures
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
235
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
236
with teachers is associated with less victimization (Corrigan, Klein, & Isaacs, 2010).
The final two papers in this issue on school
climate involve intervention studies. Nese,
Horner, Dickey, Stille, and Tomlanovich (2014)
evaluate the Expect Respect 3-hr intervention to
promote respectful behavior in three middle
schools who were implementing a school-wide
positive behavior support intervention. They
find that verbal and physical aggression was
significantly reduced in these schools, which
was assessed via direct observation. However,
no significant changes were reported in pre/
postratings of school climate, suggesting that
although aggression was reduced in this short
period of time, perceptions of the school climate
were not changed. Low and VanRyzin (2014)
also focus on the relation between school climate and stand-alone interventions, by examining baseline school climate as a moderator of
impacts of the Steps to Respect (STR; Committee for Children, 2001) over a 1-year period. In
this large scale randomized clinical trial, multilevel analyses reveal that positive school climate was strongly related to reductions in bullying related attitudes and behaviors in
intervention and control schools. After controlling for school climate, intervention status
yielded only one significant main effect. In addition, STR schools with positive school climate at baseline had less victimization at posttest. It is interesting that reductions in bully
perpetration were found for those intervention
and control schools in which the administration
had clear policies about bullying and had a clear
commitment to bully prevention. This study is
important in suggesting that bullying prevention
is a process, and that positive climate may be a
foundational component of bullying reduction
that also serves to enhance skills covered in
stand-alone bullying prevention programs.
Conclusions
Taken together, this collection of articles validates previous scholarship on school climate
(albeit with more advanced analytic methods),
presents new measurement approaches to
school climate, and furthers our understanding
of how climate works in orchestration with programs that specifically target peer aggression/
violence in schools. These articles spawn several areas that warrant further inquiry. These
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
237