Abstract

ALTUNDAğ, Yunus  and  BULUT, Sefa. The Effect of Solution-Focused Brief Counseling on Reducing Test Anxiety. Av. Psicol. Latinoam. [online]. 2019, vol.37, n.1, pp.1-12.  Epub June 07, 2019. ISSN 1794-4724.  https://doi.org/10.12804/revistas.urosario.edu.co/apl/a.6270.

Test anxiety is a very common phenomena observed in K-12 level of education all over the world. This can take a more complex and stressful form in countries using national exam in university entrance. Turkey is one of those countries. Since higher education is free for all of citizens, students have found themselves confronting a very competitive testing-culture. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of the solution-focused brief counseling approach on test anxiety of senior year high school students. An experimental study was conducted in an Anatolian high school in Bolu, Turkey in the academic year 2015-2016.

Sixteen students participated in the study, eight of them were in the experimental group, other eight were in the control group. The ages of the students varied between 16 and 18 years; the average age of the experimental group was 17, while it was 16.87 in the control group. Six of the participants were male, whereas ten were female. Because the data set was not normally distributed and the number of participants was less than 30, nonparametric tests were preferred for data analysis. Mann Whitney-U and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests, which are nonparametric techniques, were utilized in data processing. The results revealed that the four-session individual psychological counseling based on solution-focused brief approach was effective in mitigating students' test anxiety. These findings were found to be consistent with the related literature.

Keywords : Solution-Focused Brief approach; psychological counseling; test anxiety; adolescent; high school student; university entrance exam.

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