The comparison of the effectiveness of meta-cognitive therapy and meichenbaum's self-instructional on test anxiety of high school girl students

The present study aims to compare the effectiveness of meta-cognitive therapy and Meichenbaum’s verbal self-instructional on reducing test anxiety of high school girl students. Research method was experimental with pre-test and post-test schemes and a control group. The statistical population consists of all female students suffering from test anxiety in public high schools of Ilam city and in the academic year of 2014-2015. The statistical sample is 45 female students with test anxiety from Ilam Fazilat high schools which have been selected using the simple random sampling method in the following manner; one of the girl high schools of Ilam city was randomly selected and the anxiety test was conducted for 500 of students. Then, 45 of these students, which had above 60 score with test anxiety, were randomly distributed into two test and one control group. 8 sessions of therapeutic interventions were performed on the test groups. Spielberger’s Anxiety Test were utilized in order to measure the test anxiety. Analysis of covariance was used to analyze the data.The obtained results indicate that both of the treatment groups were more effective than the control group in reduction of test anxiety. Also, meta-cognitive intervention is more effective than verbal self-instructional. Meta-cognitive therapy can be used as a psychotherapy method of choice, as a complementary method for other methods of cognitive therapy in order to reduce test anxiety.