About 1 in 4 elementary students in the United States reports being bullied at least once during a given school year.
Children who are frequently bullied are more likely to struggle in school, experience poorer physical health and face higher risks of depression, anxiety and substance use as they age. These effects can persist into adulthood, contributing to unemployment and financial instability.
Most bullying research focuses on children’s individual traits, such as whether they display signs of aggressiveness or whether their parents physically punish them at home. Children who experience non-physical but harsh or punitive discipline at home may also be more likely to engage in bullying.
Overall, bullying rates vary widely across classrooms.
New research I conducted with colleagues at the University at Albany and other schools finds that classroom environments play an important role in bullying. Children have a slightly higher risk of being bullied when they are in classrooms that are frequently disrupted by student misbehavior, or are chaotic – even after considering individual factors, like a child’s personality and family experiences.
Our findings show that bullying is not only influenced by who children are, but by the environments they are exposed to at school.
Evaluating classroom environments
We analyzed teacher and student surveys collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics from 2014 through 2016. This nationwide data looked at teachers and children who were in the third, fourth and fifth grades.
Teachers evaluated whether their classroom environment was disruptive by reporting how many students struggled to pay attention, behave appropriately or follow instructions. They also gave an overall rating of classroom misbehavior. Students reported how frequently they were bullied, including being teased, called names, intentionally excluded from play or subjected to physical aggression like pushing and hitting.
To make sure the findings reflected a real pattern and not a coincidence, we used a statistical method that tests whether the same students reported more or less bullying when they were in more or less disruptive or chaotic classrooms across different grades.
In other words, we looked at how changes in a child’s classroom environment were linked to changes in their own experiences of bullying. This approach helps separate the effects of a classroom environment from differences between children’s personal characteristics and experiences at home.
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Reducing classroom chaos
Traditionally, anti-bullying efforts target individual students’ behaviors or family dynamics. Interventions might include teaching social skills or giving parents more support and training in responding to their kids’ behavior.
However, programs that target only bullies or victims are not always effective at preventing bullying.
Our findings suggest that reducing classroom chaos is a viable path toward decreasing bullying. The effects we observed are small but consistent, meaning the pattern held even under strict tests. We think awareness of this connection could help make a meaningful difference across a classroom.
Teachers reporting that classrooms are disruptive reflects both students’ behavior and the challenges teachers face in overseeing a classroom full of students. These challenges include keeping students focused, encouraging appropriate behavior and ensuring that students follow instruction.
In more chaotic classrooms, students may be talking over one another, leaving their seats or struggling to stay on task. This creates an environment where it is harder to maintain order and can lead to a “spillover effect,” in which negative behaviors spread. As a result, aggression can become more common and even be reinforced within the peer group, increasing the likelihood of bullying.
Managing a chaotic classroom can also be demanding and emotionally exhausting for teachers. They must spend more time handling disruptions and keeping students on task. This can limit not only the time and energy they have to prevent or respond to bullying but also their ability to notice it in the first place.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that chaotic or disruptive classrooms often reflect broader challenges, such as large class sizes, limited school funding and students dealing with difficulties outside of school, such as poverty, housing instability or trauma.
Supporting educators with professional development options, like offering training on how to support students emotionally and connecting rules to positive or negative consequences, can help to reduce the likelihood that children will misbehave in class.
The impact of classroom chaos also intersects with broader social inequalities.
Previous studies show that students from low-income families, racial and ethnic minority backgrounds and those with disabilities face higher risks of being bullied. Our study helps explain why: These students are more likely to be in chaotic classrooms.
This is not because they are deliberately placed in such environments, but because they are more likely to attend schools with low budgets that might have large class sizes, fewer experienced staff and less specialized kinds of support for students.
Next steps
Bullying is a serious issue that often occurs in elementary schools, making prevention an urgent priority. Our findings shift the focus from students’ individual characteristics and backgrounds to the broader classroom environment.
Our findings suggest that reducing classroom chaos may be one promising approach to addressing bullying. Further research is needed to identify additional classroom factors that capture the complexity of classroom dynamics and how they contribute to bullying.
