Why Our Schools Need Behavioral Threat Assessment
Abstract
The School Community, Culture, and Climate (S3C) Special Interest Group (SIG) is excited to announce that we will be hosting a webinar on behavioral threat assessment. Did you know that a National Center for Education Statistics survey found that 85% of US public K-12 schools report that they have a threat assessment team? Behavioral threat assessment and management has become a widely used violence prevention strategy in U.S. schools. This presentation will answer four questions: (1) What is behavioral threat assessment? (2) Why do we need it? (3) How does it work? and (4) How do we know it works?
The video can be viewed here:
Dewey Cornell is the Virgil S. Ward Professor of Education at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Dr. Cornell is a forensic clinical psychologist, the director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project, and a faculty associate of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy. During his clinical and academic career, Cornell has worked with juvenile and adult violent offenders, testified in criminal proceedings and legislative hearings, and consulted on violence prevention efforts. He has authored more than 300 publications in psychology and education, including studies of juvenile homicide, school safety, bullying, and threat assessment. He is the principal author of the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, which is an evidence-based model of school threat assessment used in schools across the United States and Canada.
The event is free and open to the public so please share with others who may be interested (they do not need to be a member of AERA or the SIG). Please register for the event at: https://umsystem.zoom.us/meeting/register/bv7FZuFFT4aToOZIvpFgLg
Some recent papers:
Cornell, D., Kerere, J., Konold, T., Maeng, J., Afolabi, K., Huang, F., & Cowley, D. (2025). Referral rates for school threat assessment. Psychology in the Schools, 62, 1294-1305. http://doi.org/10.1002/pits.23399
Cornell, D., Maeng, J., Winter, S., Huang, F., Konold, T., Kerere, J., Afolabi, K., & Cowley, D. (2025). Equity in law enforcement actions following a school threat assessment. Law and Human Behavior.
Cornell, D., Maeng, J., Winter, S., Huang, F., Konold, T., Kerere, J., Afolabi, K., & Cowley, D. (2025). Behavioral threat assessment and equity in exclusionary school discipline. School Psychology Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/2372966X.2025.2457006
Kerere, J., Cornell, D., Maeng, J., & Huang, F. (2025). Student attacks following a school threat assessment: Statewide trends in student and case characteristics. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000249
Francis Huang
Professor / SIG Program Chair
My research interests include school climate, school violence, and threat assessment. My methodological interests focus on the analysis of clustered data (multilevel modeling).