Examining The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Psychological Hardiness and Academic Enthusiasm in Senior High School Students

students are the basic element of the educational system. The construct of academic enthusiasm refers to behaviors related to learning and academic achievement. Student enthusiasm occurs when students make a psychological investment in learning. One of the variables that affects the academic and educational enthusiasm of students is psychological hardiness. Psychological hardiness is a type of personality that consists of a set of psychological traits. Psychological hardiness is used for people who are more resistant to stress and less prone to disease than others. There are various strategies to improve students' psychological hardiness and academic enthusiasm, one of which is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of ACT education on psychological hardiness and academic enthusiasm in high school students.

The research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest and follow–up design with a control group. The study population included all high school senior students in regions 1 and 2, Sari City, Iran. Among them, 30 students with lower scores on the Psychological Hardiness Questionnaire (score less than 50) and the Academic Engagement Scale (score less than 42) were randomly assigned to the ACT and control groups. The inclusion criteria included being 15–16 years old, studying in the second level of high school in Sari education regions one and two in the academic year 2018–2019, and giving informed consent to the research. The exclusion criterion for the experimental group was the absence of more than two sessions in the training classes. Students were randomly divided into the ACT and the control groups (each group of 15 students). The Psychological Hardiness questionnaire (Kobasa, 1979) and Academic Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al., 2002) were administered in the pretest, posttest, and follow–up in both groups. The experimental group underwent ACT training in eight 90–min sessions per week. To describe the data, we used centrality and dispersion indices such as mean and standard deviation. To analyze the data, we employed the analysis of variance with repeated measurements, Bonferroni's post hoc test and analysis of variance. The mentioned statistical analyzes were done using SPSS version 22 software. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.

The analysis of the variance of psychological hardiness and academic enthusiasm was significant for the time effect (p<0.001) and group effect (p<0.001). The scores of the psychological hardiness variable in the experimental group were higher in the posttest and follow–up stages compared to the pretest (p<0.001). The scores of this variable in the follow–up were also significantly different from the posttest (p=0.015). The variable scores of academic enthusiasm in the experimental group were higher in the posttest and follow–up stages than in the pretest (p<0.001). However, there was no significant difference between the two stages of posttest and follow–up in the scores of this variable (p=0.789).

Based on the findings of this study, ACT is effective in increasing psychological hardiness and academic enthusiasm in senior high school students. So, the findings of this research can be used to improve the psychological hardiness and academic enthusiasm in students.