Abstract
The promotion of communicative competence in students play a key role in schools for the purpose of improving social, emotional and coexistence relationships in Secondary Education students. The development of said competence can represent a great strategy to improve conflicts in the classroom, notably bullying. We used a quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test control group design with a sample of 55 students from the city of Salamanca (Spain) to analyse the level of conflict and their perceptions about bullying during the 2017–2018 academic year. The anti-bullying programme called the Improvement of Coexistence and Communicative Competence (ICCC) programme used is. The behaviour of students based on their level of coexistence with the group of classmates was measured by the INSEBULL instrument (Bullying Assessment Instrument), which added one more dimension of own elaboration. The results showed that, even though the significant levels of conflict, they decreased substantially once the ICCC programme was applied. Furthermore, we found differences between the control and experimental groups which underlined the effectiveness of the program. Regarding gender, no differences were found in the experimental group. This study shows that the development of communicative competence in students has a significant impact on their level of coexistence with other classmates, although the results suggested the need for longitudinal implementation of the programme in order to improve school coexistence and social skills of students from the early stages of education.
Highlights
In the education context, bullying and harassment represent important global problems with negative consequences for physical and mental health [1], and teachers’ involvement is key to the comprehensive training of students [2]
The results section is divided into five sections: the first section, the perceptions of the students regarding each dimension of the instrument are descriptively analysed; in the second section, the equality between the groups before starting the Improvement of Coexistence and Communicative Competence (ICCC) programme is studied; the third section analyses the efficacy of the programme by comparing the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group; in the fourth section, the effectiveness of the programme between the control and experimental groups is analysed; and in the last section, gender is compared in the pre-test and post-test design
These results highlight the significant effect of the ICCC programme on students, which corresponds with the results found in similar studies such as those by Ferrer-Cascales et al [46], Muñoz-Fernández [47], McCoy et al [48], and Siregar et al [49], among others
Summary
In the education context, bullying and harassment represent important global problems with negative consequences for physical and mental health [1], and teachers’ involvement is key to the comprehensive training of students [2]. It is not surprising that bullying has been the subject of numerous studies in the school context regarding public health [3], self-harm [4], sexual orientation and gender identity [5], and cyberbullying [6]. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 3047; doi:10.3390/ijerph17093047 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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