Understanding and Managing Student Stress

Abstract

An understanding of stress and coping is important for all educators. Understanding the stress experienced by students, for example, in relation to teaching, assessment, and coping, is important if education is to be optimized, and it helps educators understand their own stress experience and potentially cope better, making them more effective in their relations with students. This chapter opens by outlining what is meant by stress and how it has been studied from a historical perspective. Stress has tended to be conceived as synonymous with distress, and most empirical studies use measures that construe it in this way. An overview will be offered of some of the key research that has explored the adverse consequences of stress, along with the research efforts that have explored stress as a necessary ingredient to achieve. Stress is both the physiological and psychological response to demands, and stress also refers to those demands that trigger that response. Sections will be offered on those stimuli demands or sources of stress and on their effect on students.