The effect of the resilience Psycho-Education program on 8th-grade students' resilience, school burnout, and school attachment levels

Abstract

This study aims to examine the effects of a Resilience Psycho-Education Program (RPEP) on the resilience, school attachment, and school burnout levels of 8th-grade students. It is an experimental study based on the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test models, which involves an experimental group, a placebo treatment group and a control group. The independent variable of the research is the Resilience Psycho-Education Program. The dependent variables are 8th-grade students' resilience, school burnout, and school attachment scores. The research was carried out with impartially and randomly selected 54 students who were attending 8th grade in Akyazı, ISE, and Zergan secondary schools in Kızıltepe district of Mardin province in Turkey. Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28), Elementary School Student Burnout Scale for Grades 6–8 (ESSBS) and School Attachment Scale for Children and Adolescents (SASCA) were applied to the participants in the study group. In the research procedure, RPEP consisting of 8 sessions was administered to the experimental group; the placebo group took part in media-literacy studies consisting of 7 sessions that were not related to psychological resilience and no procedure was applied to the control group. Follow-up measurements were performed twice, which are two and six months after the application of post-test. To analyze the data, the Kruskal-Wallis H test and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test were utilized. The research found significant differences (p <.05) between the post-test scores of the experimental, placebo, and control groups in favor of the experimental group in all measurements. The determined effect persisted even after two and six following months. As a result, the findings obtained from the study suggested that RPEP may be an effective means of increasing the psychological resilience and school attachment levels of the students in the experimental group and reducing their school burnout levels.