Coping with school failure: Development of the school failure coping scale

The present study describes the development of a self-report measures of coping with school failure for children and adolescents. A list of 56 items had been collected in the sample of 142 subjects aged from 9 to 18 years. The items were administered to 500 elementary and high school students. Factor analysis of the data produced seven coping strategies: Anger, Accepting Responsibility, Comfort and Forgetting, Seeking Social Support, Parents, Inadequate Reactions, and Disengagement. Internal consistencies were in the .59 to .76 range. Significant age effects were found for Accepting Responsibility, Comfort and Forgetting, and Parents, indicating that elementary school children, compared to high school students, accept greater responsibility try harder to forget and take comfort, and seek kelp more from their parents. Significant gender effects were found for Accepting Responsibility, Seeking Social Support, and Inadequate Reactions, indicating that girls accept greater responsibility, more often use social support, and have fewer inadequate reactions than boys. Overall pattern of results also suggests that high achievers use more positive coping strategies (mainly accepting responsibility) and less negative strategies (anger, inadequate reactions and disengagement)than low or average achievers.