P25: The Effectiveness of Positive Thinking Skills on Locus of Control and Controlling the Test Anxiety for Female Student of 3rd Grade of High School

Test anxiety is one of key factors which weaken the student’s morale and confidence and reduce their creativity and gradually become the permanent personal characteristic and mostly results in feeling of inadequacy. Human’s locus of control is usually roots in personal belief system about the causes of the different personal experience and the causes of the success or failure, so it has great effect on human behavior. This research is to investigate the effectiveness of positive thinking skills on Locus of Control and controlling the examination anxiety for female student of 3rd grade of high school. The research method is quasi-experimental study methods with pretest-posttest control group. 36 third grade female student of high school from Qazvin city were selected as samples by random sampling and they answered Spielberger's Test Anxiety Questionnaire. Students were placed into an experimental group and a control group. Spielberger's Test Anxiety Questionnaire and Rotter's locus of control questionnaire were used in this research. After the pretest, the experimental group was trained by the positive thinking skills through eight 90-minute training sessions. After training sessions, the same questionnaire was answered by both experimental and control group in two phase of pretest and follow up (1 month). The results were analyzed with repeated measures analysis of variance. Results show that the positive thinking skills training caused the significant differences between experimental and control group (α=0.05). Based on the research results it can be stated that “Training the positive thinking skills can be used as medical and educational practices for students”.