Factor Focus: Stress Management (Calmness & Coping Strategies)

The "Factor Focus" series is designed to review various noncognitive factors and their relevance to student success.

The last ~20 years have seen an increasing acknowledgement that stress is not just a part of life (particularly for students), but a threat to well-being and success. In earlier efforts to assess noncognitive skills, I often addressed "sensitivity to stress" as a general indicator of how stressed students tended to feel. However, in some of the work leading up to ISSAQ, I came across some frameworks in the healthcare literature that helped me see that stress, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.

Stress is the acknowledgement that the stimuli you're receiving are too much for the resources you have. In other words, it's a sign that the current strategy isn't working. For emergency room doctors, as one example, this is a good thing. When there are too many patients in the ER, you need to triage, call for help, and take other actions to manage the situation. While "staying calm" and avoiding the sensation of stress might be great for professional athletes, public speakers, or even surgeons, there are many times when ignoring the excessive stimuli (i.e., not "feeling stressed") and continuing the same behavior is incredibly detrimental.

What's important is how we respond to stress. Do those actions help ameliorate the situation? Do they help us process the stress? Do they help us feel more capable of managing all those excessive stimuli? For college students navigating new academic demands, financial pressures, and social transitions, that response matters enormously. What's more, we as educators need to recognize that students are experiencing and responding to stress in new situations, in a new environment, without their traditional support networks, and all while they may not have learned how to do so properly in the first place.

Thus, within the ISSAQ framework, stress is addressed through two related but distinct factors: Calmness and Coping Strategies. Together, they form what we broadly refer to as Stress Management - an acknowledgment that stress is a complex, two-part phenomenon. Understanding it requires looking at both how susceptible students are to stress in the first place, and what they do when stress arrives.

What is stress management?

Within ISSAQ, Stress Management is not a single scale but a combination of two complementary factors that together capture the full arc of how students experience and respond to stress.

Calmness refers to a student's general resistance to stress. More specifically, it measures the tendency to perceive that life demands are exceeding one's available resources. Students who score low in Calmness are more likely to experience this perception - that is, they are more susceptible to stress. Students who score high are less likely to feel overwhelmed by the demands placed on them. It is worth noting that, in ISSAQ scoring, Calmness items are reverse-scored: the items themselves assess susceptibility to stress, but the factor is framed positively, so that higher scores reflect greater calmness.

Coping Strategies refer to the behaviors students engage in when they do encounter stress. Drawing from well-established theories of stress and coping (Endler & Parker, 1999; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), ISSAQ identifies four strategies - two adaptive and two problematic. The adaptive strategies are planful problem solving (developing a plan to address the source of stress) and seeking social support (turning to others for assistance). The problematic strategies are avoidant coping (ignoring or distracting oneself from the stressor) and emotional coping (responding with unregulated emotion, such as anger or despair). In ISSAQ, the adaptive strategies are scored positively and the problematic strategies are scored negatively, producing an overall Coping Strategies score that reflects a student's general orientation toward an adaptive stress response.

The theoretical foundation here comes primarily from the transactional model of stress and coping developed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), which frames stress not as a stimulus or a response, but as a relational process - a perception that the demands of a situation exceed one's available resources. This framing is important because it locates stress in the interaction between person and environment, not solely within the individual. That distinction has meaningful implications for how institutions think about supporting students.

How Does Stress management Impact Success?

The relationship between stress and academic success is more nuanced than popular discourse often suggests. Two large-scale meta-analyses found that neuroticism - the personality domain most closely related to stress and anxiety - had essentially no correlation with student outcomes (O'Connor & Paunonen, 2007; Poropat, 2009). Similarly, prior work by Markle et al. (2013) found no direct relationship between students' stress sensitivity and first-semester GPA, retention, or grades in entry-level courses.

This might seem surprising. But it becomes clearer when we consider the Yerkes-Dodson (1908) law, which describes a curvilinear - rather than linear - relationship between arousal and performance. Too little arousal leads to disengagement and underperformance. Too much leads to anxiety and impaired functioning. A moderate level of stress, it turns out, may actually support performance. So Calmness alone is not a straightforward predictor of success in either direction.

What matters more is how students respond to stress. This is where Coping Strategies become particularly important. Eaton and Bean (1995) were among the first to examine coping strategies in relation to student retention, finding that an approach-oriented coping style significantly predicted whether students persisted. More recent research has explored how coping interacts with other variables - for example, Pierceall and Keim (2007) found that stress and coping interacted in predicting problematic student behaviors, while Dyson and Renk (2006) found that coping strategies moderated the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms among first-year students.

In other words, Calmness and Coping Strategies should be understood together. A student who experiences stress but copes adaptively - by making a plan, seeking help, and taking action - is in a meaningfully different position than a student who experiences the same stress but responds by avoiding the problem or becoming emotionally dysregulated. It is this combination, not either factor in isolation, that helps us understand the role of stress in student success. The figure below might be helpful in imagining the four archetypes that students might embody as Calmness and Coping interact.

Coping Strategies also connect naturally to other factors in the ISSAQ model. A student's ability to cope is related to their organizational skills (Organization), their sense of social connection (Sense of Belonging), and their willingness to reach out for support (Help Seeking). Viewing Stress Management within this broader profile allows institutions to respond more precisely - not just to the presence of stress, but to the underlying conditions that may be making adaptive coping more difficult or the strategies that might make coping easier.

How Can We Foster Stress Management?

Because both Calmness and Coping Strategies reflect patterns of perception and behavior, they are - to varying degrees - malleable. Institutions have meaningful leverage to support students' stress management through both proactive programming and responsive support structures.

Normalizing Stress within the College Experience

One of the most impactful things institutions can do is help students understand that stress is a normal and expected part of college - not a sign that they don't belong or aren't capable. Orientation programs, first-year seminars, and advising conversations that explicitly acknowledge the challenges of college transition can reduce the likelihood that students interpret stress as a personal failure. When students understand the Yerkes-Dodson curve - that some stress is actually productive - they are better positioned to distinguish between manageable challenge and overwhelm (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908).

Teaching adaptive Coping strategies

Institutions can directly support Coping Strategies by teaching students what adaptive coping looks like in practice. Workshops on stress management, study skills courses, and wellness programming can introduce students to planful problem solving and help-seeking as concrete, learnable strategies. These efforts are most effective when they are embedded into the academic experience - in first-year seminars, advising sessions, or student success courses - rather than offered only as optional wellness programming that students may not access until a crisis has already emerged (Robotham & Julian, 2006).

Connecting Students to Social Support

Seeking social support is one of the two adaptive coping strategies in the ISSAQ model, and it is closely linked to Sense of Belonging and Help Seeking. Institutions can strengthen this dimension of coping by ensuring students have access to meaningful relationships - with peers, advisors, mentors, and staff - and by actively promoting those connections before stress escalates. Proactive advising, peer mentoring programs, and intentional community-building can all increase students' perceived social resources, making adaptive coping more available when stress arrives (Dyson & Renk, 2006).

Reducing Unnecessary Environmental Stressors

Because stress emerges from the perception that demands exceed resources, institutions also have a role in examining the demands they place on students. Unclear course policies, inconsistent communication, high-stakes single assessments, and complex bureaucratic processes can all contribute to students' perception of overwhelm. Simplifying and clarifying institutional processes - while ensuring robust access to financial, academic, and personal support - can reduce the environmental load that pushes students toward stress in the first place.

What Faculty Can Do to Support Stress management?

The classroom is often where stress becomes most visible - and most consequential. Thoughtful course design can go a long way toward reducing unnecessary stress without lowering academic standards. Providing clear expectations, predictable course structures, and timely feedback reduces the ambiguity that tends to amplify stress. Scaffolded assignments with intermediate deadlines help students avoid the accumulated pressure of large, high-stakes submissions.

Beyond course design, the way faculty respond to students in moments of stress matters enormously. A student who approaches an instructor after a difficult exam is at a decision point - whether to persist or withdraw, to seek help or give up. When faculty respond with genuine interest in the student's situation, offer concrete strategies, and communicate belief in the student's capacity to improve, they model adaptive coping and reinforce the idea that challenge is navigable. Conversely, responses that feel dismissive or evaluative can deepen students' sense that they lack the resources to succeed.

Faculty can also help by connecting students to institutional resources early - before stress has escalated into crisis. Normalizing counseling services, academic support, and advising as routine parts of college life (rather than last resorts) reduces the stigma that can prevent students from seeking help when they need it most.

Conclusion

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who is a bigger fan of talking about mental health than me. Not only have I struggled with anxiety and depression off and on for basically my entire adult life, but I've also benefited immensely from meditation, counseling, and connecting with my social network in an effort to address these issues. As humbling as mental health struggles can be - often bringing on feelings of isolation and helplessness - successful efforts to address mental health situations can provide an incredible feeling of connection, support, and even control.

Stress is not the enemy of student success - unmanaged stress is. Within the ISSAQ framework, Stress Management captures both the tendency to experience stress and the strategies students use to respond to it. Neither factor alone tells the full story. A student who rarely feels overwhelmed but, when they do, responds by avoiding the problem is in a different kind of risk than a student who feels stress frequently but consistently turns to planning and support.

By understanding Stress Management as a two-part dynamic - and by treating both dimensions as malleable - institutions can move beyond generic wellness messaging toward more targeted, meaningful support. When students are equipped with adaptive strategies, connected to supportive relationships, and operating in environments that do not unnecessarily amplify their stress, the experience of challenge becomes a feature of growth rather than a precursor to departure.

References

• Dyson, R., & Renk, K. (2006). Freshmen adaptation to university life: Depressive symptoms, stress, and coping. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(10), 1231-1244. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20295

• Eaton, S. B., & Bean, J. P. (1995). An approach/avoidance behavioral model of college student attrition. Research in Higher Education, 36(6), 617-645. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02208315

• Endler, N. S., & Parker, J. D. A. (1999). Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS) manual (2nd ed.). Multi-Health Systems.

• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

• Markle, R., Olivera-Aguilar, M., Jackson, T., Noeth, R., & Robbins, S. (2013). Examining evidence of reliability, validity, and fairness for the SuccessNavigator assessment (ETS Research Report No. RR-13-12). Educational Testing Service.

• O'Connor, M. C., & Paunonen, S. V. (2007). Big Five personality predictors of post-secondary academic performance. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(5), 971-990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.03.017

• Pierceall, E. A., & Keim, M. C. (2007). Stress and coping strategies among community college students. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 31(9), 703-712. https://doi.org/10.1080/10668920600866743

• Poropat, A. E. (2009). A meta-analysis of the five-factor model of personality and academic performance. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 322-338. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014996

• Richardson, M., Abraham, C., & Bond, R. (2012). Psychological correlates of university students' academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 353-387. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026838

• Robotham, D., & Julian, C. (2006). Stress and the higher education student: A critical review of the literature. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 30(2), 107-117. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098770600617513

• Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459-482.