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Coping with School Stress: A Comparison of Adolescents With and Without Learning Disabilities

Cheryl Geisthardt is a doctoral student in human development and family studies at Iowa State University specializing in marriage and family therapy and child development. She is interested in the coping strategies used by children and adolescents to cope with stress in their environment. This research was a part of her master's thesis in human development and family studies at Texas Tech University.

Joyce Munsch

Joyce Munsch is an assistant professor in Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include adolescent relationships and adolescent stress and coping, with a focus on issues of diversity. Address: Cherly Geisthardt, 101 Child Development, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011.

The experience of school-related stress during the transition to junior high school is compared in a sample of 59 students with learning disabilities (27 females, 32 males) and 402 students without learning disabilities (241 females, 161 males). Using a checklist of 11 stressful school events, the authors found that adolescents with learning disabilities were more likely to report that they had failed a class and less likely to report they had been chosen for a school activity than their non-learning disabled peers. However, the two groups of students did not differ in their perceived stressfulness of any of the pertinent school events. Students with learning disabilities reported relying on cognitive avoidance as a coping strategy more heavily than did non-learning disabled students when coping with an academic stress event, and reported that they mobilized fewer peers for social support when dealing with an academic stressor or with an interpersonal problem. The implications of these differences for the students' well-being are discussed. It is also suggested that school policies need to be examined for their impact on the opportunity for students with special needs to form supportive peer relations within the school environment.

Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 29, No. 3, 287-296 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/002221949602900307


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