Orefield Middle School in Pennsylvania adds a new mural to a wall in the school each year. The visual theme changes, but the featured words — respect, compassion, courage, welcoming — largely stay the same.
Whether it’s Scrabble-themed or made up of student signatures, the wall showcases concepts and virtues that can have a marked effect on bullying behavior in schools.
Administrators and teachers know that communicating these concepts should not stop at displaying the desired behavior on a wall. According to Matthew Carlson, school psychologist at Orefield, it takes a whole-school approach that addresses both school culture and bullying behavior.
This evidence-backed approach to combat bullying is pulled directly from the playbook Carlson studied when he trained under Clemson faculty involved with the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, a comprehensive K-12 program that started in Norway.
Clemson faculty and the Olweus program have enjoyed a longstanding research relationship, and they recently concluded a major study of bullying prevention efforts in U.S. schools. Evaluating nearly 70,000 students across 210 elementary, middle and high schools in Pennsylvania over two years, the study revealed significant, sustained positive impacts.

A LANDMARK STUDY
Dan Olweus, developer of the program, says the research, published in August 2018 in the Journal of School Psychology, recorded reductions in student reports of being bullied and bullying others, finding that in all but the eighth grade, reductions in bullying ranged from 11 to 17 percent, while reductions in bullying others ranged between 27 and 37 percent for all grades. The research also found that results were stronger the longer the program was in place.
“All too many young people have their lives more or less ruined by peer bullying during school years,” says Olweus, who has been studying bullying since 1970 and conducted one of the first systematic intervention studies against bullying in the world in the 1980s in Northern Europe. “It is rewarding to see that the program has provided a large number of bullied students safer and better lives and that schools can learn new and more effective ways of preventing these problems.”
In addition to reductions in self-reports of being bullied and bullying others, the study found increases in students’ expressions of empathy for bullied peers and decreases in students’ willingness to join in bullying. Students’ perceptions that teachers were actively addressing bullying also increased after the prevention program was put in place.
Olweus says previous studies in the United States had been modest in scope and length, recording few positive results. He says the recent study’s size sets it apart from previous studies of prevention efforts: “Given the scarcity of positive results from anti-bullying programs in the U.S., this study is a breakthrough.”
Susan Limber, a professor at Clemson and a primary author on the study, says the program’s effectiveness comes from its whole-school approach.
“It’s important to see how a bullying prevention program such as the Olweus program can affect not only the behavior of students, but also students’ perceptions of the school climate that are related to bullying,” Limber says, adding, “Despite some more ingrained behaviors in older students, we still see quite positive responses in later grades. Ideally, bullying prevention should be implemented K-12.”