NSF Award
2017727
Understanding how discipline in schools occurs and its effects on students and others in the educational system implicate scholarly and policy arenas. This project will examine traditional and emerging approaches to discipline commonly employed in schools by studying these approaches together as opposed to in isolation. In doing so, this research will provide an appreciation of several disciplinary measures in schools, how they operate in tandem, and how students and others perceive these approaches to discipline. <br/><br/>Employing a mixed methods approach, this project will integrate several literatures across fields to provide an understanding of disciplinary approaches to youth in schools. The project will recruit student and staff perspectives to explore the effects of differing types of discipline and ways to respond to harm and violation in schools. This research will employ student focus groups in the process of survey development, including self-reporting by students about their own experiences and an experiment to ascertain student responses to various disciplinary scenarios. School staff and law enforcement also will be interviewed, providing a comparison of perceptions between students and authorities. Working under the rubric of procedural and restorative justice theories, this project will aid in understanding issues of school safety, fairness, and justice, with a particular focus on youth perceptions of these issues. Findings will be widely disseminated and made available to scholars, school officials, policy makers, and other stakeholders.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
