Implementing The KiVa Antibullying Program: What Does It Take?

There is variation in how teachers and schools implement bullying prevention programs. Although this variation has been discussed, there has been little empirical research concerning the relationship between implementation fidelity and program outcomes. This thesis contains three studies, each of them in the context of implementing the KiVa antibullying program, and examines teachers’ actions in preventing and intervening in school bullying. The first aim of this thesis is to examine implementation degree of the KiVa curriculum and its’ association with reductions in victimization and bullying perpetration (Study I). The second aim is to clarify why teachers displayed different degrees of adherence to the KiVa curriculum during a school year (Study II). Thirdly, it is investigated whether recognizing victimization can be difficult for school staff (Study III). In addition to these peer-reviewed studies, the thesis includes a qualitative analysis (unpublished) of the teachers’ open answers concerning their implementation experiences. The data were collected from elementary school teachers (Studies I–II; the unpublished study), elementary school students (Study I), and students on the elementary and middle school levels (Study III) during the evaluation of the effectiveness of KiVa antibullying program between 2007 and 2009. The findings demonstrate that a larger reduction in victimization can be achieved in classrooms where teachers display higher levels of adherence to the KiVa curriculum and invest more time for preparing the lessons. Bullying perpetration, however, was not equally affected by the level of curriculum implementation. With respect to the implementation process over one year, there was significant variation between individual teachers’ activity—ranging from systematic and high implementation to declining delivery from lesson to lesson. The sustained actions (high and moderate levels of implementation) were premised on principal support for antibullying work. Lesson preparation was associated with keeping implementation high throughout the school year. The findings also implied that the belief in the effectiveness of the program is important for a higher implementation degree at starting point of the process. Finally, there are severe flaws in teachers’ ability to identify students who are victimized. As it turns out, it is possible that only one-fourth of chronically victimized students are helped by the school staff. Especially when the victims are middle-school-aged girls, when they bully others themselves, or when they do not tell adults about bullying, reaching out for them is difficult. Implementation and dissemination of research-based interventions will take a good deal of time and effort. The findings demonstrate that active implementation is important for improving program outcomes. They also show how implementation can be sustained—there are both individual and interpersonal factors that facilitate or inhibit high-quality implementation. Thus, implications for future research regarding the implementation of school-based programs are suggested.

A longitudinal study on the lexical sophistication and sentence length in Finnish upper secondary school students’ English compositions.

The aim of the present study was to find out the level of lexical sophistication and the mean length of sentences used in compositions written by Finnish upper secondary school students of English. In addition, the present study investigated the possible relationship between the two abovementioned variables. The study at hand was longitudinal: as data, a set of 50 compositions were collected in 2014 from the same writers both in the first and the final year of upper secondary school, 25 in the first year and 25 in the final year. In the analysis, an internet-based program called VocabProfile was utilized in order to find out the lexical sophistication of the investigated students. To find out the mean length of sentence and the relationship between these two, I used Microsoft Excel. Findings of the present study include a minor decrease in the use of less frequent vocabulary and a slight increase in the use of the two most frequently appearing thousand words of English: both of these changes were 1.99 percentage points. As for the mean length of sentence, it grew by 1.28 words during upper secondary school. As for the relationship between the two variables, no clear correlations could be found. It became, however, relatively clear that the topic of the composition might have an effect on the results. Thus more research is needed to fully see the effect of lexical sophistication and mean length of sentence on one another. In addition, future research would benefit greatly if all investigated students wrote on the same topic.