The Effects of Problem-Solving Skills Training on Academic Self-Efficacy and Engagement in Female Students with Learned Helplessness

Psychologists emphasize the importance of improving the quality of education and students’ achievement. Learned helplessness is among the factors that significantly impact students' academic failure, i.e., defined as the perception of uncontrollability of events. Learned helplessness caused by uncontrollable events leads to the belief that success and failure are beyond one's efforts. When one understands that their action has little effect on the environment and this situation continues forever, they become helpless. When helplessness recurrences and the condition becomes out of control, the individual stops attempting to solve problems. This inability leads to a decrease in students' academic self–efficacy and academic engagement. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of problem–solving skills training on academic self–efficacy and academic engagement difficulties in students with learned helplessness.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. The statistical population of the study included all 11th–grade female students in Maragheh City, Iran, in the academic year of 2019–2020. Fifty–Six of them were diagnosed with learned helplessness after administering the Learned Helplessness Questionnaire (Quinless & Nelson, 1988). Then, 40 eligible candidates with a score less than cut–off point 96 in the Academic Self–Efficacy Questionnaire (Owen & Framan, 1988) and a score lower than the cut–off point of 59.5 in the Academic Engagement Questionnaire (Schaufeli et al., 2002) were selected by purposive sampling method. Then, they were randomly divided into the experimental and control groups (n=20/group). The number of research samples was obtained based on the effect size of 0.83, an alpha of 0.05, and a power of 0.90 per research group. Furthermore, no one was excluded from the study after randomization. The required data were gathered in the pretest and posttest phases using the Academic Self–Efficacy Questionnaire (Owen & Framan, 1988) and the Academic Engagement Questionnaire (Schaufeli and et al., 2002). The experimental group received 10 sixty–minute sessions of problem–solving skills training in 5 weeks as per the package of D’Zurilla and Goldfried (1971). Descriptive statistics, including mean and standard deviation as well as inferential statistics, including Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) were applied for analyzing the collected data in SPSS. The significance level for all tests was set at 0.05.

The ANCOVA results indicated that group problem–solving training increased the posttest score of academic self–efficacy in the experimental group (p<0.001). The effect size of the academic self–efficacy score was measured as 0.656. Moreover, the ANCOVA data indicated that group problem–solving training increased the posttest score of academic engagement in the experimental group (p<0.001). The effect size of the academic engagement score was obtained to be 0.55.

According to the research findings, problem–solving skills training impacted self–efficacy and academic achievement in the explored students with learned helplessness. Thus, teachers can use problem–solving skills while teaching students.