Comparison of the effectiveness of Adlerian group counseling and dialectical behavior therapy on the academic buoyancy of unsuccessful male students in Universities Entrance Exam

Various researches have been conducted in this regard, but the present study compares two methods of Adlerian group counseling and dialectical behavior therapy in the academic life of male students who failed the entrance exam, which is rare in its kind. The present study was conducted by comparing the effectiveness of Adlerian group counseling and dialectical behavior therapy in the academic vitality of male students who failed the Zanjan entrance exam.

The current research design is applied and its method is semi-experimental. The statistical population of this research includes 587 male high school students who failed in the 2019 entrance exam. 45 of these students were voluntarily selected and randomly divided into three groups of 15 (one control group and two experimental groups). In the first group, the intervention was based on the Adlerian group counseling protocol of Alizadeh and Hashemi (2007), and in the second group, the intervention was based on the dialectical behavior therapy protocol of Miller et al. (2007), and the third group, as a control group, did not receive any intervention. The required data were collected in three periods: pre-test, post-test and follow-up. The tools of this research were used in all three stages of the academic vitality questionnaire (Dehghanizadeh and Chari, 2013) based on the academic vitality scale (Martin and Marsh, 2006). Data analysis was done using repeated measure analysis of variance by SPSS-24 software.

The effect of dialectical behavior therapy method on students' academic vitality (F=99.52, P<0.001) was more than Adlerian group counseling method.

Based on the findings of this research, it can be concluded that dialectical behavior therapy can be used to restore academic vitality in students who have experienced academic failure.