Direct Observations of Office Disciplinary Referrals for Aggressive and Other Disruptive Behaviors in Elementary Schools

Aggressive behavior in childhood is a major developmental and educational concern, but school discipline records provide limited information about how aggression is identified and managed in everyday settings. This study used direct observation to characterize office discipline referral (ODR) events among kindergarten through fifth-grade students in 2007, with each of 14 schools observed for one designated week near the end of a randomized school-based intervention trial. Observers recorded 348 referrals involving 296 students. Aggressive or destructive behavior—physical aggression, verbal aggression, or property destruction—accounted for 46.8% of referrals, with physical aggression alone accounting for 38.5%. Aggressive/destructive referrals involved descriptively longer office stays than other referrals, although the within-school difference was smaller and imprecisely estimated after accounting for school-level clustering. Fifth grade had the highest overall referral rate, whereas kindergarten referrals were proportionally most likely to involve aggressive/destructive behavior. Exploratory matched-pair comparisons provided little evidence of differences between intervention and comparison schools in aggressive/destructive referral rates, although some differences in referral composition and prolonged office stays remained imprecisely estimated. ODRs capture a consequential but selective subset of childhood aggression: behavior that is observed, interpreted, and formalized through school disciplinary procedures.