The development of academic coping across late elementary and early middle school: Do patterns differ for students with differing motivational resources?

The way that students cope with the difficulties and setbacks they encounter daily in their academic work can make a material difference to their learning, school success, and capacity to re-engage with challenging educational activities. Because of their potential importance to students’ everyday academic resilience, educators and researchers are interested in the development of adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping—both how they improve or deteriorate over students’ educational careers and the factors that underlie their differential development. Using information on self-reports of 5 adaptive and 6 maladaptive ways of coping, collected from 1,018 American third through sixth graders in fall and spring of the same school year, this study examined (1) the normative progression of these 11 ways of coping across fall of third to spring of sixth grade, and (2) whether developmental patterns differed for students with differing motivational resources. A generally stable profile of constructive coping was evident during Grades 3 and 4 (in which adaptive strategies were high and maladaptive responses low), followed by modest improvements across fourth to fifth grades. Marked shifts were apparent across the transition to middle school. Compared to spring of fifth grade, students in fall of sixth grade reported lower levels of all adaptive and higher levels of all maladaptive ways of coping, and this trend persisted across the first year of middle school. Although motivational resources did not produce differing developmental trends, they did seem to organize coping. Highest levels of adaptive coping were found for students high in both personal and interpersonal assets, just as the highest levels of maladaptive coping were found for students high in both personal and interpersonal liabilities. Findings suggest that both motivational and developmental approaches are needed to fully account for patterns of age-graded trends in academic coping across late elementary and early middle school.