Effects of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy on Academic Anxiety of Children with Learning Disorders

چکیده

 Objective: Reports showed that a cognitive-behavioral therapy effectively helps patients overcome a wide variety of maladaptive behaviors such as anxiety. The aim of the present study was to further examine this issue by exploring the effects of a cognitive-behavioral therapy on academic anxiety of children with learning disorders.Methods: The quasi-experimental research design was pretest-posttest with a control group. The statistical population included 32 children (9-13 years) with academic anxiety (mild, moderate and severe) who were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly (using a coin-throwing method) assigned to two experimental and control groups. The standard School Anxiety Scale questionnaire was used to measure academic anxiety. The behavioral-cognitive therapy program was implemented for 12 sessions, 3 sessions of 45 minutes each week for the experimental group. After the intervention, all participants participated in posttest. Paired sample t test, independent t test, and analysis of covariance were used to analyze data.Results: The average of academic anxiety before the intervention in the experimental and control groups was 23.94±2.18 and 22.87±3.64, respectively, and the independent t-test did not show a significant difference (P=0.39). The average of the groups shows that the academic anxiety scores of the experimental group have decreased compared to the pre-test scores (t=16.58, P<0.001). Finally, the results of ANCOVA showed that a cognitive-behavioral therapy has led to a reduction in academic anxiety (P<0.001).Conclusion: Reconstructing children’s thoughts and beliefs helps them to identify their wrong thoughts about the exam and gradually replace them with correct beliefs and thoughts. Therefore, teachers and practitioners can use cognitive-behavioral therapy to help children with learning disorders to have less anxiety without feeling hurt from the negative evaluation of others.