BALTIMORE, Md. – An annual school survey is showing a decade-long decline in all types of bullying, from physical attacks to verbal and cyber abuse.

Researchers at John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health published their most recent findings on bullying in the May 1 edition of the journal Pediatrics. The data is gleaned from a total of 250,000 students at 109 different Maryland schools between 2005 and 2014 and focuses on all types of bullying in a moth period preceding the surveys, according to U.S. News & World Report.

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“We found that bullying and related behaviors were decreasing, which indicated improvements in student behaviors and school climate,” lead researcher Tracy Evian Waasdorp said.

Wassdorp believes “it is possible that policy changes, as well as increased attention to and awareness of bullying nationally, are factors that likely contributed to these improvements over time.”

The study included similar numbers of boys and girls, 60 percent of which were white, 18 percent black, 9 percent Native American, 7 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian. The survey defined physical bullying to include pushes or slaps, verbal bullying as threats, and cyber bullying as teasing or shaming online.

According to U.S. News & World Report:

The researchers reported that physical, verbal and rumor-spreading bullying fell about 2 percent every year, dropping — on all fronts — to below 10 percent by the last year of surveying.

The investigators also observed a 1 percent to 2 percent drop per year in the rate by which students instigated bullying themselves. That rate also dipped below 10 percent in the last few years of the surveys.

In addition, over time, fewer students indicated that they had witnessed bullying — from 66 percent to 43 percent over the decade. Roughly 80 percent of students said they felt safe while at school, and that figure also followed an upward trajectory over time.

An increasing number of students are also reporting that adults are doing enough to combat bullying – an increase from 39 percent to 71 percent over the course of the survey.

“We need to continue to monitor it to ensure that these decreasing trends do not plateau or take a turn for the worse,” Waasdorp wrote in an email to MedPage Today. “As researchers, we need to continue to study programs that aim to prevent and intervene with bullying that occurs among our children – both in their schools and in their communities. Parents and other adults also need to continue to keep communication open about healthy peer relationships.”

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The research was accompanied by an editorial from Stephen Leff, co-director of the Violence Prevention Initiative at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Chris Feudtner, the hospital’s director of Media Ethics and Research for the Pediatric Advance Care Team, argued that the results of the survey are a good thing, but “the (bullying) rates are not falling quickly enough.”

“While rate of all types of bullying are declining, the study did not look at impact,” the editorial read. “For instance, while cyber-bullying rates were quite low, a single incident can have a devastating impact on victims and schools, because it can be observed by so many students over and over.”

On the positive side, “schools and bullying experts know more today about what really works to reduce bullying behaviors, and schools have become better consumers,” Leff and Feudtner wrote.