Victims of bullying suffer academically as well, UCLA psychologists report
August 21, 2010 by Leslie E. Packer PhD
Filed under Research
Stuart Wolpert describes some new research out of UCLA on the impact of bullying:
Students who are bullied regularly do substantially worse in school, UCLA psychologists report in a special issue of the Journal of Early Adolescence devoted to academic performance and peer relationships.
The UCLA study was conducted with 2,300 students in 11 Los Angeles–area public middle schools and their teachers. Researchers asked the students to rate whether or not they get bullied on a four-point scale and to list which of their fellow students were bullied the most — physically, verbally and as the subject of nasty rumors.
A high level of bullying was consistently associated with lower grades across the three years of middle school. The students who were rated the most-bullied performed substantially worse academically than their peers. Projecting the findings on grade-point average across all three years of middle school, a one-point increase on the four-point bullying scale was associated with a 1.5-point decrease in GPA for one academic subject (e.g., math) — a very large drop.
You can read the entire press release on UCLA’s web site. As of the time of this posting, I do not see the full research report online yet.
