A Psychological Counseling Study on Fear of Failure and Academic Procrastination with a Spiritually Oriented Cognitive Behavioral Group

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of psychological counseling with an eight-session group study based on the spiritually oriented cognitive behavioral approach, which was developed to reduce high school students’ fear of failure and academic procrastination levels. The study uses an experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group. The sample group of the study consists of 20 female students (10 experimental and 10 controls) attending 11th grade at an Imam Hatip High School in the Üsküdar District of Istanbul during the 2018-2019 academic year. The experimental and control groups were applied the Error Making Anxiety Subscale of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale and the Academic Procrastination Scale as the pre-tests and post-tests. Spiritually oriented cognitive behavioral psychological counseling was conducted in 90-minute sessions for eight weeks. The non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test has been used to determine whether a difference exists between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups. The non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test has been used to test whether significant differences exist between the fear of failure and academic procrastination pre-test and post-test scores for both the control and experimental groups. As a result of the study, the psychological counseling with spiritually oriented cognitive behavioral group study was found to have an effect on fear of failure and academic procrastination. The results have been discussed last.