Prevalence and comorbidity of emotional, behavioral and learning problems: a study of 7th-grade students

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the prevalence of emotional, behavior and academic problems and their association in a 7th grade school-based sample. Behavioral data were gathered in the beginning and end of the school year and academic data were collected six times throughout the year (twice every trimester). In the whole we found that, in the beginning of the school-year 42% perform under the pass/fail threshold, against 46% at the end of the school year; 19% exhibited significant behavior problems and around 10% showed emotional problems. However, by the end of school-year there was a dramatic increase in the number of reported emotional and behavior problems while academic performance was slightly worse. Also, in the beginning of the school year, students who received lower academic grades exhibited more emotional and behavior problems than their normal peers; by the end of the year differences were much larger. Regression analysis showed that academic achievement better predicts emotional problems than behavior problems, and odds ratio showed that both externalized and internalized problems were much more likely in poor than in normal/high achievers.