Schools are becoming significant sources of stress for children. Efforts to reform schools usually lay emphasis on academic acceleration, competition, evaluation, reduction of learning burden and accountability. The balance between the stress resulting from motivation to learn and that related to pressures to achieve success and avoid failure has ceased to exist. academic preparation and mastery learning strategies become stress inducing. Students find it difficult to adapt to the changing demands of educational situations. This learning stress leads to learning inhibition, less development of competencies needed for learning and citizenship, drop out, failure in school, and retarded development of information processing abilities. The need for creating an educational climate in the classrooms is being felt by teachers who work to facilitate learning. Stress related problems and sources of stress need to be identified, their influences are to be identified and moderated, and academic alienation is to be checked. Studies on incidence of learning stress, the effects of debilitating learning stress, strategies for ameliorating the deleterious influence of learning stress and factors that exacerbate or reduce distress are needed. Stress management competencies are to be fostered and the positive coping strategies are to be supported. The latter author constructed a ‘Learning Stress Inventory’ to measure learning stress among students

studying in fifth grade. This paper embodies the efforts made to make it more suitable for students of upper primary to degree level and standardize it.