Effects of Teaching Problem Solving Skills on Students' Social Anxiety

Abstract

Introduction: Social anxiety which refers to obvious and persistent fear of social situations, and rises from the individual's beliefs, affects millions of people each year. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of teaching the problem solving skills on reducing students' social anxiety.Materials and method: This study was a quasi-experimental one. By employing multi-stage sampling, 200 female high school students of Tehran's public schools were selected and examined by Social Anxiety Scale. Then 40 students who had achieved the highest scores on the scale were randomly selected among them, and divided into two experimental and control group randomly. Based on D'zarilla & Goldfield’s problem solving model, the problem solving skills were taught to the experimental group during 12 two-hour sessions.Results: Results showed that Social anxiety among the students who received problem solving skills training was significantly lower than the students who didn’t receive the teaching and also problem-solving skills had the appropriate stability over time.Conclusion: Teaching problem solving training is proposed as an effective method to get rid of anxiety among students and preventing psychological and physical trauma and behavioral problems.