Maren Dennis and Dr. Betty Ashbaker, Counseling Psychology and Special Education
SchoolTipline.com is a website where students can report issues of school violence, drugs, or other problems to administrators. This service provides students, parents, and administrators with a two-way communication system that aids in reporting and dealing with school safety issues. Students can access School Tipline 24/7 and anonymously report any problems they see or experience at school directly to school administrators. After receiving the report, administrators can respond to student reports and take preventative action to effectively help students and create a safe school environment.
During the last year, we have focused on disseminating our findings about School Tipline and school violence from previous years. During 2008, we submitted an article to the Journal of School Violence. With suggestions from the editor, we have been revising that article, which was based on data from a focus group. The Journal of School Violence was interested in our project, but thought our data was too preliminary. However, we still hope to publish this article in another journal.
A graduate student joined our research team and completed her thesis. Since she is doing an internship this semester and is very busy, I am helping her turn her thesis into an article-length document that can be published. We plan to submit this article to the Journal of School Violence for publication. The research for her thesis was focused on a demographic study where we conducted surveys in three schools, one rural, one suburban, and one urban.
In the past year, I presented at the McKay School Undergraduate Research Conference Poster Session and at the President’s Leadership Council where I met and discussed our research with generous BYU donors. I also co-presented at the Utah Conference for Undergraduate Research held at Westminster College. This was a highlight of my time as a researcher with Dr. Ashbaker. The classroom we presented in was full, and the audience asked thoughtful questions that challenged our research and made me think about it more deeply. I learned a great deal from that experience.
In addition, I co-presented at the National Resource Center for Paraprofessionals Conference held in Salt Lake City. This offered a unique experience to meet with a part of the school community that sees students being bullied. The paraprofessionals in attendance were very interested in our research and also gave us helpful feedback in regards to how we could improve our research and make our system more useful to schools.
I was also interviewed by a McKay School news reporter about my experience presenting at the paraprofessional conference and at UCUR. The interview was published on the McKay School website. I think the purpose of the interview was to help inform other students about undergraduate research opportunities. I was happy to help get the word out because I have had such a positive experience working with Dr. Ashbaker over the last four years.
The continuing goal of this research is to learn about how students prefer to report bullying and to use that information to make a system for schools to improve the quality of student incident reports. Dr. Ashbaker and I plan to refine our articles and get our results published so others will be aware of our data and find it useful in identifying how to get students to report and reduce school violence.