Why do we teach U.S. history and government to students? The answer is simple: to prepare students for engaged and informed citizenry, the essential ingredient for preserving the American republic. Unfortunately, ACTA's most recent "What Will They Learn?"® survey of the core curricula at over 1,100 colleges and universities found that…

Following a shooting at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, students from that school began to take matters into their own hands, meeting and networking on social media, speaking to the media, participating in vigils, organizing walkouts and demonstrations, establishing coalitions with others who share their outrage and goals, and…

The decision on how to protect the children and youth while at schools is a serious conversation with varying agreements on the best practices. Some feel that school personnel should not be trained nor expected to be able to react to an armed person while others believe that training of school personnel and allowing them to be armed will deter…

When children and youth feel unsafe, adults need to act. The damaging effects that feeling unsafe and being exposed to violence have on young people and their ability to succeed are well-established. These scientific insights make clear the urgency with which the people of this country must intervene in schools and communities to change the…

Recent incidents of school-based violence have resulted in the widespread implementation of school safety strategies across the United States. While research on these strategies has grown over the past decade, there is little understanding about their collective influence on indicators of school violence. Using data from the 2007-2008 School…

Purpose: To create a high-stress shooting among the crowd (SAC) program and to examine its effectiveness in reducing SWAT trainees' stress level and their shooting performance in a simulated hostage-rescue situation. Method: After the SAC program was created, it was evaluated using a pretest and posttest experimental design: 98 young male SWAT…

National debate over law enforcement in schools has largely overlooked student reporting of violent threats to school resource officer (SROs). This statewide assessment of Virginia high school students (n = 99,358) found that the majority of Black (64%), Hispanic (72%), White (71%), and other racial/ethnic identity (71%) students agreed the SRO…

In Colombia, many adolescents have experienced violence related to the decades-long armed conflict in the country and have witnessed or been directly victimized by violence in their communities, often related to gang activity or drug trafficking. Exposure to violence, both political and community violence, has detrimental implications for…

School resource officers' (SROs) presence (e.g., engagement in patrol, carrying firearms, etc.) and prevention (e.g., mentoring, teaching) roles have not been distinguished in investigations of SROs' association with student outcomes. A model predicting nonviolent incidents and serious violent incidents reported to police from SRO presence and…

The euphemism that Florida, the nation's third most populous and politically powerful state, is a battleground is an apt description--and more than just every four years. Every year, every day in the state's capital, Florida has become high ground for pro-corporate, special-interest lobbyists who seek to instill a far-right legislative and social…

In order to explore themes of privilege in regard to policy availability, language accessibility, and underlying bias, policies related to two topics of interest to higher education campus visitors, campus firearm carry policy and smoking policy, are explored to determine how Web-based information is presented to various audiences. Implications of…

Near the end of World War II, the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb ever used in warfare. The bomb was code named "Little Boy." The fission-type nuclear bomb exploded with the energy equivalent of approximately 13 kilotons of TNT. This article describes a 16 day model-based inquiry (MBI) unit on nuclear chemistry that…

The 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech is one part of a decades-long increase in the frequency of gun violence on U.S. college and university campuses (Drysdale, Modzeleski, & Simons, 2010; Ferraro, 2015). The events at Virginia Tech also served as a catalyst for the spread of so-called "campus-carry" laws, or acts of state policy…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of gender and sexual orientation on students' perceptions of campus safety and carrying concealed handguns. A comparative research study was used to evaluate the statistical differences on the perceptions of fear of crime and campus carry by gender and sexual orientation. For this study, a total…

Witnessing violence can negatively affect students' outcomes, but their friendships may mitigate those effects. This study investigated the extent to which seeing someone shot in the last year related to seven school-related outcomes. Additionally, it examined the extent to which prosocial and deviant friends moderate these relationships. This…