Impact of the Nativized Program of Philosophy for Children on Increasing the Self-Efficacy, Happiness, and Optimism of Female First-Grader High School Students

The purpose of the present research was to examine the impact of the nativized Program of Philosophy for Children on increasing the self-efficacy, happiness, and optimism of female first-grader high school students. The research design employed to collect the data was quasi-experimental. The systematic random sampling method was used to choose a sample consisting of 80 students. Sixty of them were randomly assigned to the experimental group and 20 of them to the control group. The data were collected by administering the Children’s Self-Efficacy Scale, Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, and the Life Orientation Test (LOT) to both groups. The results indicated that there were no meaningful differences between the two groups in terms of the constructs measured by these instruments. Then the Program of Philosophy for Children was implemented in the experimental group for six 80-minute sessions. At the end of the treatment, the same three instruments were administered to both groups in order to check the effects of the program. The statistical analysis of the data through using the statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 18) revealed that there was a meaningful difference between the self-efficacy and optimism mean scores of the experimental and control groups at p < 0.05. In other words, the experimental group had significantly outperformed the control group in terms of these two constructs. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups’ happiness mean scores at p < 0.05 after the treatment. Therefore, the researchers suggest that the nativized Program of Philosophy for Children significantly increases the students’ senses of self-efficacy and optimism, while it has no such effect on their sense of happiness.