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In order to investigate the ways in which boys and girls cope with their concerns, 650 Year 11 and Year 12 students from seven post‐primary schools in Melbourne, Australia were asked to describe how they cope with the main concerns in their lives. In addition to elicitation of spontaneous responses, a modified form of the Ways of Coping Checklist (Folkman and Lazarus, 1980; 1985b) was also administered to obtain an assessment of students coping strategies.Clear differences were found between the ways in which boys and girls cope. Girls seek more social support and generally are more likely than boys to focus on relationships. They also employ more strategies related to hoping for the best and wishful thinking. The question of how boys and girls can develop their coping repertoire so as to increase the adaptability of their responses in difficult situations is also addressed.

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Coping has been investigated and discussed as a theoretical construct since the 1960s. Attempts at its measurement have resulted in the development of a number of self-report inventories, and projective techniques. This study attempted to establish the range of coping strategies employed by Australian adolescents. It was not an aim of this study to develop Australian scales, although the item pool utilized in this investigation has been of value for scale development. The study is based on the cognitive phenomenological theory of coping described by Richard Lazarus. Data were collected, in both open and closed forms from a total of 1,211 high school students in four phases during 1986 and 1987, from 11 schools in metropolitan Melbourne.The open data comprised 2,041 descriptions of how 643 students coped with an identified concern. These were subsequently grouped into 156 independent categories and formed the basis of a questionnaire designed to make explicit, domains of student coping. The closed data took the form of 500 students' responses to a 156-item checklist based on the open data. These data were analysed using factor analytical procedures.The results of the investigation indicate that there are thirteen conceptually clear coping strategies utilised by Australian adolescents.

This study investigates the effects of jigsaw cooperative learning on the achievement and knowledge retention of 80 final-year Vietnamese mathematics students, as well as reporting their attitudes toward this form of learning. These tertiary students were divided into two matched groups of 40 to be taught by the same lecturer. In the experimental group, jigsaw learning was employed, while in the control group, lecture-based teaching was used over the six weeks of instruction. The results showed that students in the experimental group, who perceived their instruction as more cooperative and more student-centered, had significantly greater improvement on both achievement and retention measures than did the students in the control group. A survey revealed favorable responses toward jigsaw learning. The major findings of this study support the effectiveness of jigsaw learning for students in Vietnamese higher education institutions.

This paper reports two independent studies designed to investigate the reliability and validity of the Long and the Short Form of the Adolescent Coping Scale (ACS). Since we have found from our research that much of an individual's behaviour is situation-specific there is a Specific Form of the ACS which allows for the measurement of responses to a particular self-nominated (or administrator-nominated) concern. However, it is also clear that an individual's choice of coping strategies is, to a large extent, consistent regardless of the nature of the concern. Thus, there is a General Form of the instrument which addresses how an individual copes with concerns in general. The two sets of data reported, utilising the General and the Specific Form (in a Long and Short format), show the value of utilising separately 18 coping scales when measuring adolescent coping strategies. The reliability, validity and empirical distinctiveness of each scale is demonstrated. Nevertheless, factor analyses reported here show that there is some benefit to be gained from considering three coping styles comprising combinations of between four and seven coping strategies. The use of coping styles is particularly relevant when the Short Form of the ACS has been administered. The justification of the use of the different forms of the scale in both educational and clinical contexts, is discussed. The instrument provides an individual or group coping profile which can be used by respondents to guide them in the self-directed change of the coping repertoire.

This suggests that failure to cope triggers off increased coping activities of all kinds and that over-use of non-productive strategies interferes with the capacity to use productive coping.