The Effectiveness of Sentimental Cognitive Therapy on Reducing Test Anxiety in Nursing Students of Islamic Azad University, Birjand, in 2018

Test anxiety is a common phenomenon among students and is one of the problems of educational system. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive therapy based on self-talk in reducing the test anxiety in nursing students of Islamic Azad University of Birjand.
This research was a semi-experimental study, using pre-test and post-test with control group. The statistical population of this study was all nursing students of the Islamic Azad University of Birjand who were studying at this college in 2018. In this research, the students were selected by cluster sampling method. Among them, 30 subjects who were the highest in the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAT) were selected as the sample and randomly divided into two groups of 15 experimental and control groups. The experimental group received 10 sessions of 1 hour self-talk educational program and the control group did not receive any special treatment. Anxiety questionnaire was used to collect data.
The results showed that there was a significant difference between the test anxiety in the experimental group and the control group after the experimental intervention (teaching self-talk strategies) at a meaningful level (P≥0.05). Mean and standard deviation of the test anxiety score in the two experimental groups and control were 53.03 ± 6.78 and 46.96 ± 10.25, respectively.
Therefore, cognitive therapy based on self-talk can be effective in reducing the test anxiety of nursing students of Islamic Azad University of Birjand and can be considered as a treatment method.