Social Competence of Learning Disabled Children: Cognitive and Emotional Aspects

Depressive mood in students with mild intellectual disability: students' reports and teachers' evaluations

The present study examined 310 students with mild intellectual disability (ID) who attended special schools and self-contained classes in mainstream schools with regard to their reports of depressive mood, and loneliness and social skills, and teachers' perception of the students' academic, social and behavioural competencies. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that: students in special schools reported higher levels of depression and felt lonelier than mainstream school students; girls exhibited a greater sense of depressive mood than boys; teachers assessed boys as having higher academic competencies than girls; and boys were considered more easily distracted and less independent. However, teachers considered girls to have more adequate social adjustment, and be more task-oriented and more independent. For both groups, depressive mood can be predicted by distractibility and loneliness; by gender and lower academic competencies for special school students; or mainly by difficulties in social adjustment in the case of mainstream school students.

Coping with school stress: a comparison of adolescents with and without learning disabilities

The experience of school-related stress during the transition to junior high school is compared in a sample of 59 students with learning disabilities (27 females, 32 males) and 402 students without learning disabilities (241 females, 161 males). Using a checklist of 11 stressful school events, the authors found that adolescents with learning disabilities were more likely to report that they had failed a class and less likely to report they had been chosen for a school activity than their non-learning disabled peers. However, the two groups of students did not differ in their perceived stressfulness of any of the pertinent school events. Students with learning disabilities reported relying on cognitive avoidance as a coping strategy more heavily than did non-learning disabled students when coping with an academic stress event, and reported that they mobilized fewer peers for social support when dealing with an academic stressor or with an interpersonal problem. The implications of these differences for the students' well-being are discussed. It is also suggested that school policies need to be examined for their impact on the opportunity for students with special needs to form supportive peer relations within the school environment.