School Violence in the K-12 Setting

According to a study conducted in 1995, 34% of middle school students admitted that they feared becoming victims of school violence. Eight percent of teachers say they are threatened with violence at school on an average of once a month. Middle school students are more than twice as likely as high school students to be affected by school violence. Seven percent of eighth graders stay home at least once a month to avoid a bully.

Explaining The Measurable Outcome (Dependent Variable)

The measurable outcome is the element of bullying. This seems simple enough because a kid hits another kid because he or she can. It is however dependent on the Independent Variable which we will discuss later. Bullying is common, it is feared, and it is evasive but it is real and it affects multitudes of lives.

Method to Measure The Outcome

Bullying is measurable via class monitors, campus watchdogs, lunchroom spotters, and undercover spies. It is also measurable via self-appointed students armed with a pencil and paper to record incidences of bully and then promptly dispense it to the school principal, the campus police or the grade counselor. With a flood of documentation, the scourge of bullying can be exterminated.

There are two causal influences – anger and power. Students are dealing with a great amount of anger at parents, other authority figures and life itself because they think they have no say in many different situations. Adults are so busy with life that they forget about the volatile positions that kids from kindergarten to 8th grade are in today. Anger is often a direct result of kids feeling they have no power. The result is going to school and beating up anybody and everybody who crosses their path.

Measuring the Casual Influence

Measuring the Causal Influence can be challenging and would be more accurate if feedback forms could be collected from the homes of the students as well as evaluation forms from the teachers in the classroom. Morning, noon and afternoon marks would show stress levels, blood sugar affects, and type of class work variants on students. Bullying has no excuse, but it does have causal influences – anger and the lust for power -which are intensified by home stress; failure of performance in the classroom and diet along with a lack of social skills.

Collecting Data on The Study’s Participants

Data would be collected on this study over a period of three months. The study co-coordinator would track the causal influence data forms from start to return to make sure all the variables are covered and all the environments are included in order to make the study as accurate and inclusive as possible. On the forms, questions would cover bullying episodes and anger and/or power struggle events that occurred at home, at school and in uncontrolled situations.

New Knowledge That Will Add To Existing Knowledge

The fresh knowledge that this correlational study would add to existing knowledge is the combined home-school-uncontrolled environment situations to get an average of bullying to gain power or to express anger over all these environments.