The Effect of Solution-Focused Brief Counseling on Reducing Test Anxiety

Abstract

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 countires uses national exam in university entrance. Turkey is one of those countries. Since higher education is free for all of the citizen, students have found themselves confronting a very competitive testing-culture. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of solution-focused brief counseling approch 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 of 2015-2016. Sixteen students were 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 number of participatns was less than 30, nonparametic tests were prefered for data analysis. Mann Whitney-U and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests, which are nonparametric techniques, were utilized in data processing. The resuls revaled 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.