The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Social Adjustment and Self-regulation Learning in Female Students with Test Anxiety

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on social adjustment and Self-regulation learning in female students with test anxiety. The research design was a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest control group. The study population was all female students of the 11th and 12th grades of Khomeini Shahr city second-cycle high schools, approximately 1693 people, in the academic year 2017-2018. Using the available sampling method and based on the cut-off point of the Sarason Anxiety Questionnaire, a sample of 28 people was selected and randomly divided into two groups of control (15 people) and experimental group (13 people). The research instruments were Sinha and Singh Social Adjustment Questionnaire (1993) and Pintrich and De Groot (1990) motivational strategies for learning questionnaire. The experimental group received eight sessions of 2-hour acceptance and commitment group therapy (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 2011). The control group did not receive any intervention. Multi-variable covariance analysis was adopted to analyze the data. The results showed that therapeutic intervention based on commitment and acceptance in the components of social adjustment and learning self-regulation led to a significant increase in performance in the experimental group compared to the control group in the post-test phase (p < 0/05); The overall conclusion is that schools by using therapeutic intervention based on acceptance and commitment can increase social adjustment and self-regulation of students' learning to achieve academic success.