How mass school shootings affect the education of students who survive

A Washington Post analysis found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools in the United States have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which is sometimes cited as the first in a string of modern mass school shootings.

What happens to these survivors a year, or two, or three later? Is their schooling affected? How have they developed emotionally?

As this Daily Beast piece notes, there is far less research on the psychology of the survivors of mass school shootings than there is on the motivations of the shooters “though the rate and increasing population of subjects means that it is a burgeoning field.”

Below is a post about one research effort to look at the educational experience of survivors, which found that enrollment fell and standardized test scores dropped, too.

This was written by Daniel Willingham, a well-regarded psychology professor at the University of Virginia who focuses his research on the application of cognitive psychology to K-12 schools and higher education. He was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences, the independent and nonpartisan arm of the U.S. Education Department, which provides statistics, research and evaluation on education topics.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Washington Post