The Effectiveness of social-communication skills training on meta-cognitive beliefs and fear of positive and negative evaluation in high school students

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of social communication skills training on metacognitive beliefs and fear of positive and negative evaluation of junior high school students.

The research method was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The study population consisted of male high school students in Aran and Bidgol that 30 male students were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to two groups of 15 experimental and control and answered to metacognitive belief Wells and Katright-Hutton (2004) questionnaires, Weeks (2010) Fear of Positive Evaluation Questionnaire, and Leary (1983) Fear of Negative Evaluation Questionnaire. The control group waited and the social communication skills group training for the experimental group was performed in 8 one-hour sessions. At the end of the intervention, both groups were re-evaluated with research questionnaires. Data were analyzed using the analysis of covariance.

The results showed that social-communication skills training was effective in reducing metacognitive beliefs (p <0.05), reducing fear of negative evaluation (p <0.05), and reducing fear of positive evaluation (p <0.05). 

The results of the study confirmed the effectiveness of the use of group communication social skills training on reducing metacognitive beliefs and fear of positive and negative evaluation of students.