Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Support students to develop productive coping strategies with the Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools, tailored for use in schools and available to purchase in your ACER online school account.
ACER is pleased to announce the launch of the Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools, an adapted version of the Adolescent Coping Scale 2nd edition, for use in a school context.
What is the Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools?
The Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools (ACS-S) is a self-guided questionnaire that adolescents can use to identify their coping profile and how often they use productive and non-productive coping strategies. This important and easy-to-use tool helps adolescents examine their thinking, feelings and behaviours and can support them to make good decisions about which strategies are helpful and develop their resilience over time.
The Adolescent Coping Scale, 2nd edition was based on rigorous research and developed on experts in the field, Dr Erica Frydenberg and Emeritus Professor Ramon Lewis. This edition that has been adapted for schools to create the ACS-S. It measures 20 evidence-based coping strategies used by adolescents, for example ‘social support’ (a productive coping strategy) and ‘wishful thinking’ (a non-productive coping strategy).
‘The Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools is an important and practical tool that can support educators to understand how their students cope and guide students to more productive coping strategies,’ states Dr Jarrod Hingston, Director of School and Early Childhood Education Services at ACER.
What is coping and why is it important?
Coping can be defined as a set of cognitive and affective actions that arise in response to a particular concern. These represent an attempt to restore the balance or remove the turbulence for the individual. This may be done by solving the problem (that is, removing the concern) or accommodating the concern without bringing about a solution.
‘Coping is a practical construct that fits into the diverse social and cultural contexts in which adolescents find themselves,’ explains Eirini Lammi, ACER’s Consultant Clinical Psychologist.
‘Due to the current climate, there has been a focus on resilience, which has been variously defined as the capacity to bounce back in the face of adversity, or as the capacity to adapt successfully in the face of adversity. Resilience, like coping, is reliant on both internal and external resources. Coping is about identifying and developing the internal resources (such as a sense of humour or of organisational skills) and the capacity to access external resources (such as friends or professional help).’
What’s new?
The ACS-S is now available in the same account schools use for their PAT administration, making it easily accessible for schools.
The version has also been streamlined to consider the school context in all administration materials and takes approximately 20 to 30 minutes to complete.
Learn more
Join our webinar on 12 June for an overview of the key features of the Adolescent Coping Scale for Schools.