The effectiveness of group schema therapy in academic perfectionism and its components in female students

School is one of the most important places where the level of evaluation and perfectionism of pupil is high and is associated with fear of failure, motivational problems, anxiety and low self-esteem. Perfectionism is one of 18 maladaptive schema proposed by Young, but little research has been done on the effect of schema therapy on academic perfectionism. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of group schema therapy on reducing academic perfectionism and its components including academic performance, academic anxiety, academic achievement, academic failure and expectations of others in students. This study was a quasi-experimental study of pre-test, post-test and follow-up with a control group. The statistical population included all 10th grade female high school students in Tehran in the academic year of 1397-98. From these individuals, 300 people were randomly selected by cluster sampling method and 30 of them were selected based on inclusion criteria and were randomly divided into two groups of 15 experimental and control. The experimental group received group schema therapy during sixteen one-hour sessions. The research instrument was Rasooli Khorshidi and Bahrami (2016) Academic Perfectionism Questionnaire. SPSS 20 software and analysis of covariance were used to examine the relationship between quantitative variables. In the post-test, there was a significant interaction between the experimental and control groups in terms of academic performance, academic anxiety, academic achievement, academic failure and expectations of others (p <0.05). As a result, group schema therapy can be used to reduce students' academic perfectionism and its components.