The Relation Between Students’ Perceptions of Instructional Quality and Bullying Victimization

Abstract

Instructional quality may serve as a protective factor against school bullying victimization internationally. This study investigated this using the data provided by TIMSS 2011 fourth grade students. Given the highly-skewed distribution of the bullying scale and the clustered structure of the TIMSS data, a multilevel (students nested in classes) zero-inflated Poisson regression was used and responses to the bullying items were treated as rough counts. Covariates identified as predicting bullying at the international level were controlled for. Findings from the international model indicate that better instructional quality is associated with lower rates of student self-reported bullying victimization. At the educational-system level findings are mixed. The analysis suggests that bullying begins at an early age and that, at the fourth grade level, bullying victimization is an international phenomenon. Although instructional quality is associated with lower reported bullying victimization rates internationally, cross-system differences point to the important fact that instructional quality will not, in and of itself, globally lower rates of bullying in schools.