The effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy on social adjustment, academic self regulation and cognitive flexibility of students with special learning disabilities

The purpose of this study was to study the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment based therapy on social adjustment, academic self-regulation and cognitive flexibility of students with special learning disabilities.

The research method was quasi-experimental using a pre-test-post-test design with a control group and a follow-up stage. The statistical population of the present study consisted of female students with learning disabilities in the first secondary school of Sari city who referred to learning disability centers in Sari city. In this study, 60 students with special learning disabilities were selected by purposive sampling and sampling method. Were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In order to collect data, Connell and Ryan questionnaires of academic self-regulation, Bell social adjustment and Dennis and Vanderwall cognitive flexibility were used. First, the pretest was performed on two groups, then the experimental group underwent acceptance and commitment therapy for 8 sessions, each stage for 120 minutes and once a week. Then post-test was performed on both groups. Analysis of covariance and repeated measures were used to analyze the data under SPSS22 software.

The results showed that there is a significant difference between the scores of quality of life, academic self-regulation, social adjustment, cognitive flexibility of the two groups after the application of treatment training based on acceptance and commitment.

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.