Students face many challenges that can increase stress. Effective coping with stress is important for success in life, as is the development of individual resilience. All students experience stress to some extent, but students with severe specific learning difficulties may be more susceptible to stressful experiences due to the specifics of their deficits. Students with severe specific learning difficulties are more likely to have difficulties in developing certain skills and are more likely to resort to less adaptive coping strategies in stressful situations. The concept of resilience also plays an important role in successful coping with stressful events, as it defines individual characterictics of functioning in stressful situations.
The main aim of the master's thesis was to examine three concepts: stress, coping with stress and resilience in sixth through ninth grade elementary school students and to identify possible differences in these three concepts between groups of students without and with severe specific learning difficulties.
In the empirical part of the study, we examined these differences between the two groups of students using a survey technique with three questionnaires, the Stress in Children Questionnaire (SiC), the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). A descriptive and causal non-experimental research method and a quantitative research approach were used in this study. We included a sample of sixth through ninth grade elementary students (N = 58) who formed 24 equivalent pairs of students with and without deficits in individual learning areas.
Results showed that the two groups of students (with and without severe specific learning difficulties) did not differ significantly in their levels of stress, choice of coping strategies, resilience and the dimensions of resilience. Furthermore, average final grades in the selected subjects were not related to the stress levels. In addition, a correlation was found between the resilience questionnaire scores and dimensions of resilience scores with the stress experience questionnaire scores for both groups, as well as between some of the dimensions of resilience and stress experience. For the last research question, a statistically significant correlation was found between some coping strategies (positive refocusing, refocusing on planning, positive reappraisal, perspective taking, catastrophizing) and resilience.
The group of students without severe specific learning difficulties differed significantly in their stress levels according to the respondents' gender and grade. In addition, for the group of students without severe specific learning difficulties, we found a negitive association between the final grade in English and the coping strategy positive reappraisal, while stress level was positively associated with the coping strategy rumination and negatively associated with the coping strategy positive reappraisal.
For students with severe specific learning difficulties a significant association was found between gender and the coping strategy rumination, and between final grades in mathematics with the coping strategy positive reappraisal.
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