50 were taken from Government school Sinha and Sinha scale for measuring academic stress was used to see the magnitude of stress and Sinha and
Singh Adjustment Inventory for school students was used to examine level of adjustment among the students. Results indicated that magnitude of academic stress was significantly higher among the Public school students where as
Government school students were significantly better in terms of their level of adjustment. However, inverse but significant relationships between academic stress and adjustment were found for both the group of students and for each type of school. Stress and anxiety in children and teenagers are just as prevalent as in adults. Negligence of parents, high expectations in academic or other performances, abused childhood, growing up tensions and demand for familial responsibility etc. the main causes of childhood and teen stress. Parents who are not emotionally available for their children or lack positive coping mechanisms themselves, often spur stress in their offspring.
Stressed children show signs of emotional disabilities, aggressive behavior, shyness, social phobia and often lack interest in otherwise enjoyable activities. In a study
Dawood (1995) found that students stress affects their academic performance. He further showed that the most frequently mentioned stressor by students was school and fear related stressors. Many teenagers tend to become non-conformist and fall prey to teenage depression in response to a variety of growing up anxieties. However, stress induced fears and anxiety in children adversely affects children’s performances at various levels. Hodge (1996) investigated that prevalence of stress were found particularly among those students who were by their nature prone to anxiety.
Tung and Chahal (2005) examined relationship between stress and adjustment and found no significical causal relationship between stress and the adjustment . However direction of the results implied that level of adjustment influences the number of stress full events and amount of stress experienced by them.
Each day we faced with new situations that demands decisions involve change in both our internal state and our external environment. The process of adjustment involves a person’s attempt to cope with master and transcend such challenges. This working definition provides a starting point
10 71 for understanding adjustment. However, adjustments are not always definite. Neither it is right or wrong nor do they necessarily have clear starting points or endings. This combination of questions can make the concept of adjustment difficult to grasp.
According to Aggrawal (2004) the adjustment of adolescent very much depends on the fulfillment of their significant specific needs that consist of physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, intellectual needs, moral needs and vocational needs. It may be helpful, therefore, to devote a little more space to two important qualities of adjustment. First, it is a process that involves continuous changes and the second people develop consistent pattern of adjustment to these constant changes. Students make many transitions during their years of schooling: from home to school, middle to high school, and high school to college or work.
These transitions are usually major events in the lives of students and parents. The stresses created by these transitions can be minimized when the new environment is responsive to each particular age group. This digest presents a brief overview of some of the issues involved in the transition from elementary to middle school and provide suggestions for transition programs and activities. In a study Isakson et al, (1999) employed a short term longitudinal design to assess the adjustment of adolescents as they mode from junior high to high school and found that the adolescents did experience significant changes during the initial transition into high school that were related to sense of school membership, perceived support from parents was also related to adolescents adjustment to the transition.
Keeping in view the growing problem of academic stress among school students the study was undertaken to examine the level of academic stress among high school students and its probable impact on the overall adjustment among them.
-http://medind.nic.in/jak/t08/s1/jakt08s1p70.pdf