Common Bond Between School Bullies and Their Targets: Alcohol Abuse

A new study out of the University of Cincinnati finds that both school bullies and their victims are likely to abuse alcohol after a bullying episode. Keith King, a University of Cincinnati professor of health promotion, along with Rebecca Vidourek, a UC assistant professor of health promotion, will present early findings of a new study on Oct. 29, at the 140th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in San Francisco.


The study examined bullying, recent alcohol use and heavy drinking episodes among more than 54,000 7th-through-12th grade students in schools across Greater Cincinnati, including the Tristate regions of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. The data was collected by the Coalition for a Drug Free Greater Cincinnati as part of the 2009-2010 Pride Survey on adolescent drug use in America.

Results of the Greater Cincinnati analysis found that more than 38 percent of students were involved in school violent victimization, defined as ranging from verbal intimidation to threatening with and using a weapon.

The study found that school violent victimization was associated with increased odds of recent alcohol use and heavy drinking among males and females and across 7th-12th grades. King and Vidourek say the analysis also found that males, non-whites and junior high school students were more likely to be victimized by bullying.

King adds that junior high and high school students were one-and-a-half times more likely to have abused alcohol if they had been bullied. “The overall effect of victimization and alcohol use did not differ based on sex, age or race. It has an overall impact on their drinking rates and level of intoxication across all categories,” says King.

“Also, bullies and their victims are reporting similar types of activity in relation to their drinking patterns. We believe the alcohol abuse may often be an effort to escape problems and to self-medicate,” says King.

The UC researchers also found that bullies and victims of bullying were less likely to be engaged in positive activities such as school clubs, sports or community and church organizations. “The results of this study mirror our past studies in examining adolescent behavior, and how positive connections with schools, families and their communities can positively and significantly impact the social and emotional health of youth,” says King.

King says future studies will closely examine other adolescent drug use besides alcohol.

The Pride Survey is a national survey that provides an independent assessment of adolescent drug use, violence and other behaviors. The Coalition for a Drug-Free Greater Cincinnati promotes drug-free environments for youth by enhancing partnerships to educate, advocate and support locally-based, community mobilization.

Soda consumption, screen time, team sports at school influence students' weight

Soda consumption, TV and video/computer games, and the frequency of meals heavily influenced students' weight in an Indiana University study that examined the impact of a school-based obesity intervention program over an 18-month period.

More soda consumption and screen time meant students were more likely to be overweight or to gain weight. The more frequently students ate meals each day, the less likely they were to stay overweight or gain weight during the study, which examined the Healthy, Energetic, Ready, Outstanding, Enthusiastic Schools program.

Dong-Chul Seo, associate professor in the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington, said participation in team sports also contributed to students' ability to achieve a healthy weight.

"Schools and families may be able to successfully focus on these modifiable risk factors, decreasing the burden of childhood obesity," he said.

HEROES, implemented by schools in southern Indiana, northwestern Kentucky and southeastern Illinois, is sponsored by the Welborn Baptist Foundation and based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Coordinated School Health Model. HEROES is intended to enhance schoolwide wellness culture through changes in physical education, nutrition, the physical environment, health promotion efforts for school staff and family, and community involvement. Researchers from IU's School of Public Health-Bloomington and the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community have been evaluating the HEROES initiative for the past four years.

"Predictors for Persistent Overweight, Deteriorated Weight and Improved Weight Status During 18 Months in a School-Based Longitudinal Cohort" involved 5,309 students at 11 schools.

Seo said the findings confirm the connection between higher levels of soda consumption and persistent overweight and deteriorating weight status, and they support the recent and controversial New York City ban on sales of supersized soda and other sweetened beverages.

The finding about the relationship between the number of meals students eat daily and their weight contributes to a scant amount of evidence in this area.

"Thus, encouraging students to maintain a regular meal pattern with at least three meals a day appears to be a good strategy to help students achieve healthy weight," Seo said.

The research found that the overall socio-economic status of a school had an impact on students. Those attending schools with lower socio-economic status were more likely to be overweight or to gain weight during the study period. This could reflect the greater opportunities students have for nutritious food offerings and physical activity at schools with high socio-economic status, Seo said, or it could reflect peer influence.

A new approach to early reading skills may be better

Many educators have long believed that when words differ on only one sound, early readers can learn the rules of phonics by focusing on what is different between the words. This is thought to be a critical gateway to reading words and sentences.

But scientists at the University of Iowa are turning that thinking on its head. A recent study published in Developmental Psychology shows certain kinds of variation in words may help early readers learn better. When children see the same phonics regularities, embedded in words with more variation, they may learn these crucial early reading skills better. What might appear to make learning a more difficult task—learning about letter-sound relationships from words with more variation—actually leads to better learning.

Doctoral student Keith Apfelbaum and associate professors Bob McMurray and Eliot Hazeltine of the Department of Psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) studied 224 first-grade students in the West Des Moines, Iowa school system over a period of three months. The group used a version of an online supplementary curriculum called Access Code.

Access Code was developed by Foundations in Learning, a company founded by Carolyn Brown and Jerry Zimmermann. Brown and Zimmermann earned their doctorates from and are now adjunct faculty in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, also in CLAS. Based on the Varied Practice Model, which helps children master early reading skills like phonics, the research team used Access Code to conduct the study directly in the classroom.

During the study, one group of students learned using lists of words with a small, less variable set of consonants, such as maid, mad, paid, and pad. This is close to traditional phonics instruction, which uses similar words to help illustrate the rules and, presumably, simplify the problem for learners. A second group of students learned using a list of words that was more variable, such as bait, sad, hair, and gap, but which embodied the same rules.

After three or four days of training on phonics skills, partaking in activities such as spelling and matching letters, the students from both groups were tested to see if they could read words that they had never seen before, read novel non-words, and apply their newly-learned skills to tasks they hadn’t done before.

“We were interested in not just whether they could do exactly what we were teaching, but whether they could learn something more robust that would enable them to apply what they had learned to new tasks and new words,” McMurray says. “Critically, we wanted to know if variability or similarity would impact this ability to learn and generalize.”

Results surprised even the research team.

“We were expecting a very subtle effect, maybe similar words would help students learn the words they were trained on but maybe not generalize as well, or maybe similar words would help them learn the more difficult rules but variability might work for the easier ones, but in no case was similarity helpful,” McMurray says. “This suggests a powerful principle of learning. While we’ve known about this in a variety of laboratory tasks for a while, this study shows for the first time that this principle also applies to early reading skills.”

Overall, variation led to much better learning. Students experiencing more variation in words showed better learning when tested on the words and tasks they encountered in training. More importantly, it helped them generalize these new skills to new words, and to new tasks.

“Variability was good for the low-performing students, it was good for the high-performing students. It was good for the boys, it was good for the girls. It was good for the words, it was good for the non-words,” Apfelbaum says. “Among the students who struggled the most, the kids who weren’t exposed to variation didn’t show any learning at all, while the kids who were exposed to variation did.”

Robert Davis, an educator for 36 years and principal of Hillside Elementary, which was one of the schools that participated in the study, says he is eager to work with his teachers on ways to apply varied practice to the classroom.

“If we really look at what happened with the research, there is a multitude of applications that could go forward with this,” Davis says. “We could certainly look at varied practice as a method for learning new vocabulary, as a new method for learning basic math facts, maybe even something involved with music. As educators, we need to figure out how to take that model and apply it to the umbrella of learning for a variety of things that kids struggle with.”

Brown, whose research has focused on child development, language acquisition, and reading for more than three decades, says she looks forward to continued collaboration with the UI research team.

“We hope this collaboration is only the beginning to bringing the science of learning to the art of teaching children to read,” Brown says. “We have missed many children because reading pedagogy has been driven by systems of belief in how reading should be taught rather than by how children learn. The importance of variation in this process will be a surprise to many educators and a help to many children.”

Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs Costly & Ineffective

A new report Breaking Rules, Breaking Budgets, documents the high price tag attached to school districts’ use of discretionary out-of-school suspension, expulsion, and disciplinary alternative schools and spending on school policing—an approach that has failed to reduce student disciplinary referrals in Texas.

The 11 surveyed school districts—which educate a quarter of the State’s four million public school students—spent nearly a combined $140 million in 2010-11 on out-of-school suspensions, referrals to Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEPs), and discretionary expulsions to Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (JJAEPs). They spent another $87 million on security, monitoring services, and campus policing that school year.

Surveyed districts include: Bryan ISD, Conroe ISD, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, Dallas ISD, Fort Bend ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Houston ISD, Humble ISD, Northside ISD, Plano ISD, and San Antonio ISD.

“We recognize that many Texas school districts are struggling as a result of the $5.4 billion cut in state funding for public education approved last year to help address a state budget shortfall,” said Texas Appleseed Deputy Director Deborah Fowler. “We are releasing this report, not to point a finger at spending in the surveyed school districts, but to open a dialogue with schools about different approaches to student discipline that are more effective and less costly to implement.”

Appleseed Staff Attorney Kathryn Freeman said that a substantial body of research, including the landmark Council of State Governments’ (CSG) study released last year, shows that removing misbehaving students from school increases their risk of dropout, grade retention, and future juvenile justice system involvement. The CSG study also found that removing these students does not result in any measurable improvement in academic performance for students remaining in the classroom, she said.

“At a time when schools must do more with less, it is critical that districts scrutinize their disciplinary data and use it to strategically scale back costly, ineffective approaches to disciplining students. A portion of the cost savings can be used to implement evidence-based behavior management programs, such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), that cost less and have proven successful in reducing student disciplinary referrals in schools across the country and in some pioneering schools in Texas,” Freeman said. Implementing PBIS and other proactive behavioral management programs outlined in the Appleseed report can further reduce disciplinary referrals— creating better outcomes for students and saving tax dollars, she said.

Texas Appleseed is recommending that school districts consider: 1) limiting out-of-school suspensions to misbehavior that that impacts school and student safety (thereby increasing district’s state funding reimbursements for average daily attendance; 2) amending Student Codes of Conduct to limit the potential for a DAEP referral to only serious offenses where other forms of intervention have not proven successful or campus safety is at risk; 3) targeting school policing and security and monitoring services to campuses where they are truly needed; and 4) providing additional training in effective classroom management to administration and staff at campuses with high numbers of out-of-school suspensions and DAEP and JJAEP referrals.

“Double-dose” algebra has positive long-term effects

A new study focuses on “double-dose” algebra, in which struggling students are given twice as much instructional time as they would normally receive. The study examined the impact of Chicago Public School's double-dose algebra policy on such longer-run outcomes as advanced math course work and performance, ACT scores, high-school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. Using data that track students from 8th grade through college enrollment, the researchers analyzed the effect of this innovative policy by comparing the outcomes for students just above and just below the double-dose threshold. These two groups of students are nearly identical in terms of academic skills and other characteristics, but differ in the extent to which they were exposed to this new approach to algebra. Comparing the two groups thus provides unusually rigorous evidence on the policy’s impact.

This study provides the first evidence of positive and substantial long-run impacts of intensive math instruction on college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. The resaarchers also show that the intervention was most successful for students with relatively high math skills but relatively low reading skills. Although the intervention was not particularly effective for the average affected student, the fact that it improved high school graduation and college enrollment rates for even a subset of low-performing and at-risk students is extraordinarily promising when targeted at the appropriate students. In this case, those were students with only moderately low math skills but below-average reading skills.

This double-dose strategy has become an increasingly popular way to aid students struggling in mathematics. Today, nearly half of large urban districts in the United States report double math instruction as the most common form of support for students with lower skills. The central concern of urban school districts is that algebra may be a gateway for later academic success, so early high-school failure in math may have large effects on subsequent academic achievement and graduation rates. With the current policy environment calling for “algebra for all” in 9th grade or earlier, effective and proactive intervention is particularly critical for those who lack foundational mathematical skills. A successful early intervention may be the best way to boost students’ long-term academic success.

Low literacy rates in pre-teen girls significantly predict child-bearing among teenagers in the US

Supporting previous research, it has been confirmed that independent of other influences, low literacy rates in pre-teen girls significantly predict child-bearing among teenagers in the US, according to a new study presented at the American Public Health Association's 140th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

This is the first research of its kind to analyze the possible link with literacy among US pre-teens and teen child-bearing. The team of researchers, from the University of Pennsylvania, found a connection between 12,339 girls' seventh-grade reading scores enrolled in Philadelphia Public Schools, to subsequent birth records between 1996-2002.

Findings of their analysis showed that girls with less-than-average reading levels were two and a half times more likely to give birth in their earlier teens, compared with those that had average reading levels.

Twenty-one percent of girls with below-average reading levels had one live birth during the six-year examination period, while three percent of girls with below-average reading levels had two or more live births within that period.

On the other hand, only 12 percent of girls with average reading skills had one live birth and one percent had two or more live births. Of the girls with above average reading skills, five percent had one live birth and 0.4 percent had two or more live births.

This study also measured racial inconsistencies in literacy as a factor to teenage pregnancy. A higher percentage of African American and Hispanic girls had below-average reading skill group.

Also, the results of low literacy on risk of giving birth as teenagers was greater in Hispanic and African American girls than those who identified themselves as white. The authors suggest that poor reading skills in early grades are much harder to change, and foretell later decisions to quit formal education.

Rosemary Frasso, PhD, researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, says:

"It is quite possible that adolescent girls who experience a daily sense of rejection in the classroom might feel as though they have little chance of achievement later on in life. Our findings underscore the role of literacy as its own social risk factor throughout the life-course."


The investigators conclude that health care professionals involved with pre-teen girls should evaluate literacy when giving contraceptive and other reproductive health services to this population. Previous studies have recommended prevention programs, such as sexual health education, contraceptive use, and the distribution of free condoms in schools.

This study will appear in the February 2013 addition of Contraception.

Anxiety About Math Activates Pain Networks In Brain

Fear of math can activate regions of the brain linked with the experience of physical pain and visceral threat detection, according to research published Oct 31 by Ian Lyons and colleagues at the University of Chicago in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

The researchers found that in individuals who experience high levels of anxiety when facing math tasks, the anticipation of math increases activity in regions of the brain associated with the physical sensation of pain. The higher an individual's math anxiety, the more such neural activity was increased.

According to the researchers, "We provide the first neural evidence indicating the nature of the subjective experience of math-anxiety."

Previous research has shown that other forms of psychological stress, such as social rejection or a traumatic break-up, can also elicit feelings of physical pain. However, the current study examines the pain response associated with anticipating an anxiety-provoking event, rather than the pain associated with a stressful event itself.

This new research suggests that simply anticipating an unpleasant event may be associated with the activation of neural regions involved in processing physical pain. The authors say their results indicate that it is not the performance of a mathematical task that elicits this reaction, but merely the anticipation of math. These results provide a potential neural basis for the observation that individuals with high math anxiety tend to avoid math-related situations, including avoiding classes or math-related careers.