The effect of cognitive - behavior strategies training on reduction of exam anxiety of students of Yazd Islamic Azad University

learning cognitive - behavior strategies help students who suffer from exam's anxiety to reduce their anxiety at exam time. Present research is a quasi-experimental study with the pre-test and post-test as well as control groups. Intervention of experimental group was 6 sessions about cognitive - behavioral strategies training and was compared with control group. Study population includes all students of Yazd Islamic Azad University and the sample size of 60 persons was determined by using multi-stage random sampling. For evaluation of the effect of cognitive - behavioral strategies training in reducing exam anxiety, exam anxiety between pre-test and post-test scores of both groups were analyzed with t-tests. The difference between pre-test and post-test exam anxiety was significant with alpha level of 0.001. There are significant differences between pre-test and post-test scores of experimental and control groups witch show that intervention affects on reduction of exam anxiety. Difference in anxiety scores of post-test and one month follow up shows that the effect was sustained over time and case group has lower difference than the control group. This study suggests that exam anxiety of students will decline by learning cognitive - behavioral strategies.