Teacher-Education Students’ Stress Experience, Coping Strategies, and Pre-Teaching Performance: A Case in a Public Higher Education Institution in the Province of Cebu, Philippines

Abstract

This paper examined teacher-education students' stress experience and strategies to cope with the demands related to their pre-teaching evaluation performance. It employed a quantitative research design (descriptive-correlation) through the use of two standardized survey questionnaires, the Stress Survey Questionnaire (SSQ) and Student's Coping Scale (SCS), in collecting the needed data for inferential analysis. The respondents of this research were 135 teacher-education students of a public higher education institution in the province of Cebu, Philippines. The respondents were solicited via a purposive random sampling technique. This paper found that most teacher-education students had a very satisfactory performance relative to their pre-teaching performance evaluation. Differing from the existing literature, the respondents experienced a moderate level of stress while fairly utilizing unhealthy means to cope with the demand in school. Results further revealed that the stress experienced by respondents relates to their coping strategies. In contrast, both stress experienced and coping strategies do not relate to the pre-teaching performance of the respondents. Based on the findings and conclusion, this paper proposed an intervention plan for adoption.

Received: 10 July 2021 / Accepted: 23 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021