USU Professor to Receive National Award

Utah State University professor Scott Ross will receive the first Ted Carr Initial Researcher Award from the Association of Positive Behavior Support for his nationally recognized research in grade-school bullying prevention. Ross was selected as co-recipient for the award by a committee comprised of five prestigious researchers in the association. He was awarded based on recent publications, level of impact in the field and quality of research.

 

“I am very excited about receiving the award,” said Ross, an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation in the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services. “Being new to the state and a new professor at Utah State University, I have worked diligently to establish myself and my research in the schools of Utah.”

 

For the past six years, Ross has performed groundbreaking research in bullying prevention and instituted a widely successful anti-bullying program called the Bully Prevention in Positive Behavior Support, which uses a school-wide systematic approach, giving students and staff the skills to remove the rewards maintaining bullying behavior. The program has also received national attention in a recent research article published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.

 

 “My hope is that this award will bring additional attention to the importance of systematic, functional bully prevention, and will provide me with additional opportunities to continue my research here,” said Ross.

 

In addition to bullying prevention, Ross has also headed other research projects aimed not only at students, but teachers as well.

 

He recently conducted a large-scale study across 40 elementary schools with 184 teachers in Oregon to determine the relationship between implementation of School-wide Positive Behavior and Intervention Support and teacher perceptions of burnout and efficacy.

 

 “Results of the study were powerful, indicating that teachers in schools implementing the program had significantly lower levels of burnout and significantly higher levels of efficacy,” Ross said. “In addition, an interaction effect implied that teachers benefitted most from the program’s implementation in schools of low socio-economic status.”

 

Even though Ross is relatively new to USU, he has already received many accolades from his peers and coworkers as well.

 

“Dr. Ross is a great colleague and tremendous asset to our department,” said Ben Lignugaris/Kraft, department head of Special Education and Rehabilitation. “He has provided us a presence with the Utah Behavior Initiative where he participates on the Research and Policy Committee. In addition, he brings to the department expertise in systems change — the skills needed to change educational approaches in entire school systems.”

 

 

Writer: Andy Yerka, 320-224-1296, a.yerka@aggiemail.usu.edu