Storytelling-Based Optimism Training on Academic Burnout and Stress in Female Students

The educational system is the basis of growth and development in all societies. Therefore, it is crucial to identify factors affecting academic achievement and performance. Academic stress is among these factors, i.e., defined as the growing academic demands which exceed the available resources. Academic burnout is another characteristic impacting students' performance. Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and decreased self–efficacy that results from chronic stress, overwork, pressure, time constraints, as well as the lack of resources and support in performing assignments. Academic burnout and stress are essential variables influencing students' learning and academic achievement; thus, educational methods, like optimism training through storytelling can affect them. This study aimed to investigate the effects of storytelling–based optimism education on burnout and academic stress in seventh–grade female students.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. The statistical population consisted of all female students in Kerman City, Iran, in the academic year of 2019–2020. A total of 40 subjects were selected by random cluster sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. In experimental research, ≥15 individuals are required per group. Therefore, after initial screening and matching, 40 volunteer students were included in the study. Initially, two education districts of Kerman were randomly selected. Then, one school was considered among the junior high schools in that area; accordingly, 40 subjects were selected from the 4 classes of that school by multistage cluster random sampling approach. The inclusion criteria of the study included being seventh–grade female students, living in Kerman City, not receiving other interventions, and providing an informed consent form by the parents and students for participation in the research project. The exclusion criteria of the study were withdrawal, absence from more than one treatment session, and receiving other interventions. The measuring instruments used in the pretest and posttest phases were the Academic Burnout Questionnaire (Bresso et al., 2007) and the Academic Stress Inventory (Ang & Huan, 2006). Storytelling–Based optimism training was conducted by a psychologist who had completed story training courses at the Education Counseling Center in ten 90–minute sessions twice per week. For this purpose, the training package for optimism through storytelling (Alizadeh et al., 2014) was used. The control group received no intervention. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics (mean & standard deviation) and inferential statistics, including Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) in SPSS. The significance level of the tests was set at 0.05.

The current study results suggested that after eliminating the pretest effects, there was a significant difference concerning academic burnout (p<0.001) and academic stress (p<0.001) between the control and experimental groups at posttest. The effect of teaching optimism using the storytelling method on academic burnout and academic stress was measured as 0.684 and 0.331, respectively.

Based on the present study data, storytelling–based optimism training impacted students' academic burnout and academic stress; therefore, paying attention to academic burnout and academic stress in students is essential to their academic success.