Anti-cyberbullying lessons designed to encourage adolescent passive bystanders to become positive bystanders

Abstract

To date, anti-cyberbullying lessons in schools have been successful in transmitting knowledge. However, few evidence-based empirical studies have shown that after students attended anti-cyberbullying lessons, they adopted the beliefs, intentions, and behaviours advocated in the lessons. This study explores how anti-cyberbullying lessons can be designed to help students not only gain knowledge but also undergo a change of heart or behaviour. There are two phases to this study— designing the anti-cyberbullying lessons and testing the lessons in class. Student lesson designers (N=7) aged 14 to 15 from the school that the lesson intervention would take place were actively involved in both phases. The Design Thinking framework was adopted to guide the overall research process. At the first phase, the researcher and student lesson designers (SLDs) focused on developing effective anti-cyberbullying lessons. To gain a deeper understanding of the students’ beliefs of the intervention classes, the Theory of Planned Behaviour served as a guide to designing lesson content to address students’ beliefs that were contradictory to the preferred behaviour. The second phase, where the lesson intervention would take place, consisted of a series of three lessons conducted with three classes of Secondary Three students (N=108) to test whether the lessons were effective in influencing changes in beliefs. A convergent parallel mixed-methods approach was adopted. At the conclusion of the intervention, students had indicated a shift of beliefs towards the preferred behaviour. During the focus group discussion that took place two weeks after the lesson intervention, five students had shared that they had witnessed cyberbullying and that they had intervened. What is of concern is that it appears that the lesson intervention had addressed the beliefs but did not adequately equip students with the necessary skills to enact the preferred behaviour. In this case, three out of the five students shared that they began to ‘bully the bully’ and the other two chose to comfort the cyber-victims.