Student Bullying Prevention: Educators’ Responses to Varied Types of Bullying Occurrence in an Online School Setting

Citation

McBrayer, J., Landers, E., Posick, C. & Pannell, S. (2025). Student Bullying Prevention: Educators’ Responses to Varied Types of Bullying Occurrence in an Online School Setting. Journal of Online Learning Research, 11(1), 35-53. https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/224677/.

Abstract

The prevalence of bullying for online students is gaining importance as school safety incidents continue to rise. With more students choosing to attend online schools, understanding how bullying plays out in this setting is essential. Several factors were examined by surveying educators of an online school and included occurrences of types of bullying behaviors, whether training was received to address these behaviors, and how prepared educators felt to detect and respond to bullying. The findings indicated verbal bullying was the most prevalent type, with 75% of respondents suspecting at least one instance of verbal bullying per year, followed by relational bullying at 60%, cyberbullying at 51.9%, and physical bullying at 23.5%. When examining if educators received training for recognizing student bullying, in all cases of bullying, more educators received training than did not. Lastly, when examining how educators responded to bullying, participants reported that they felt prepared. Implications for practice suggest that bullying occurs in online settings, and thus, further efforts are needed to train educators to detect and respond to bullying. Future research is needed to see if varied types of bullying play out in different ways in both online and brick-and-mortar schools with a focus on marginalized populations.

Authors

• Landers, Eric
• McBrayer, Juliann Sergi
• Pannell, Summer
• Posick, Chad

Reference Type

Journal

Keywords

• Bullying
• K-12 online learning