School Well-being of Primary school Students with Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties

Students with Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties (EBD) face multiple challenges in school. They have high rates of school removal. Educators should understand factors contributing to their difficulties to prevent consequences such as mental health issues and delinquency (Kern, 2015; ED, 2015). Few studies consider school well-being of these students from different points of view. The aim of this study is to assess EBD children’s well-being at school, from teachers’, children and parents point of view. Participants were 433 7-11 year old children (221 boys), their parents and teachers. Teachers filled out the STR Scale (STRS; Pianta, 1999), parents filled out SDQ (Goodman, 1997), children filled out QBS (Marzocchi e Tobia, 2015). Pearson correlations show that children with behavioural difficulties (BD) are generally dissatisfied with school (r=-.27), including negative relationships with peers (r=-.25) and teachers (r=-.26) , low self-efficacy (r=-.13), and a negative emotional attitude (r=-.16). Children with emotional difficulties (ED) are less satisfied too (r=-.13) and report negative relationships with teachers (r=-.23)and peers (r=-.20). Teachers report conflictual relationships only with children with ED (r=.13). Overall, students with BP show more discomfort towards school, and teachers report conflict with them. Students with EP show relational discomfort. They perceive a negative relationship with teachers that don’t seem aware of that. It would be useful to delve into these dynamics to prevent risky behaviours and emotional problems in development. More sofisticated statistical analises are being performing to better understand relations among variables.