all items as easy or very easy were not providing a true measure of cognitive style, but

were confounding the measure with cognitive level (Kirton).

 For student stress, there was a tendency for perceived stress mean scores to be

lower than the reported norm by Gadzella and Baloglu (2001). One small contributor to

this was the removal of one frustrations stress construct item prior to data collection.

Another contributor may be the time of year at which the instrument was administered.

There was no indication of the semester that Gadzella and Baloglu conducted their study

which provided instrument norms, but Shields (2001) found that student stress decreases

during the second semester of the academic year. This may be why student stress mean

scores in this study were low when compared to Gadzella and Baloglu as these data were

collected during the spring semester.

 A one-way ANOVA was conducted to examine significant differences of student

stress levels between students taught by adaptive faculty members, middle score faculty

members and innovative faculty members. With total stress designated as the dependent

variable, a significant difference was found between the three groups (F=8.92, p=.00). A

Bonferroni post-hoc test was conducted to further examine between group differences.

The adaptive teacher group had student stress scores (M=54.51) that were on average

significantly higher than the student stress scores of the middle score teacher group

(M=49.49, p=.00) and on average significantly higher than student stress scores of the

innovative teacher group (M=50.72, p=.01). This finding confirms the results found by

previous research (Puccio, Talbot, & Joniak, 1993) and indicates a relationship between

student stress and courses taught by adaptive faculty members.