An Effectiveness of Teaching Positive Thinking and Emotional Self-Regulation Competences on Creativity, reducing Exam Anxiety and Academic Achievement in Senior High School Students in Tehran

Subject Areas : Journal of Excellence in counseling and psychotherapy

Seyedeh Sahar Hosseini ¹ , Mehrnaz Azadyekta ² , Fariborz Dortaj ³

1 - PhD student, Department of Educational Psychology, Science and Research Unit, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
2 - Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Islamshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
3 - Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran.

Received: 2022-02-24 Accepted : 2023-02-12 Published : 2023-05-22

Keywords: Academic Achievement, Creativity, Students, positive thinking, emotional self-regulation, anxiety,

Abstract :

Purpose: Teaching students' positive thinking competences is very useful to strengthen and improve positive communication with themselves, positive communication with others and their life, as well as increasing their self-esteem and academic success. Considering the importance of positive thinking and its broad aspects, including its role in adolescent adaptation, the present study investigated the effectiveness of teaching positive thinking and emotional self-regulation competences on creativity, reducing anxiety and academic achievement in senior high school students in Tehran.                                 Methodology: The scores of experimental variables were evaluated in pre-test and post-test stages. The statistical population was high school students in Tehran. The statistical sample of this study includes 45 students (15 people in the first group) positive thinking competence, (15 people in the second group) emotional self-regulation competence and 15 people in the control group.Findings: For sampling, first, two high schools were selected by convenience sampling method and 45 high school students were randomly selected from the senior high school students and placed in experimental and control groups. The research instruments were Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and Abedi Creativity Questionnaire that were administered to both control and experimental groups before and after providing positive thinking competences training to experimental group.   Conclusions: Descriptive and inferential statistics including mean and standard deviation and analysis of covariance and multivariate repeated measures analysis test were used to analyze the data. The results showed that teaching positive thinking and emotional self-regulation competences has a significant effect on creativity, reducing exam anxiety and academic achievement in students.

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