The effect of academic counseling on academic motivation, personal identity and mental health in male high school students of Bavi city

Dissertation for Master's Degree in Psychology (M.A)

Treatment: Clinical

The purpose of education and training is to flourish and actualize all human talents with well-considered programs, this requires identifying and understanding their strengths and weaknesses, counselors have played a sensitive and effective role in this field for a long time, so the main goal of this research is the effect of academic counseling on motivation. Education, personal identity, and mental health in middle school male students of Bavi city. The statistical population includes all male students of Bavi city who were studying in the academic year 93-94, from whom 60 people were selected using a simple random method and divided into two experimental and control groups. Then, for the experimental group, an academic counseling training program was held in the form of 10 sessions of 90 minutes, and to collect information from the questionnaires of Harter's academic motivation, Bardbar's personal identity, and Goldberg's general health, as well as, for data analysis, statistical methods were used. Descriptive and one-way ANOVA analysis of covariance was used, and the significance level for the hypotheses was considered ? = 0.05. SPSS software was used.  The findings of the research show that academic counseling has a positive effect on academic motivation, personal identity and mental health. Conclusion: Based on the findings of the above research, the researcher believes that in order to make optimal use of all the material and spiritual investments made in education, educated counselors should be used in schools to provide the means for academic growth.

Key words: academic counseling, Academic motivation, mental health, individual identity, education

Introduction

    Man is the only creature that exchanges opinions with his fellows and consults with them and uses their guidance to understand and solve his problems. Guidance and counseling have been important throughout people's lives, and they consulted those who were accepted and trusted by them. With the development of humanities and behavioral sciences, attention was paid to guidance and counseling as an independent branch of behavioral sciences. The academic and career counselor should make the person aware of the job needs of the country, the person's desires and talents. The counselor only has the role of advising and guiding the person (Hedayat and Academic Counseling of America, 2007). Today, guidance and counseling are professionally helpful to help people who have problems in growth, adaptation, decision-making, family relationships, social skills, and lifestyle, and counseling helps these people to find a suitable solution to their problems. Students face many problems during their studies. The counselor can provide effective help to students in solving these problems. Education: In the case of such students, the counselor must make a plan to learn the basic lessons from the point of weakness, or the help of the family compensates for his basic weakness. Preparing the student and his parents for such a program requires counseling sessions, which are in charge of the school counselor. In the case of such students, whose number is not small, the counselor should look for the cause of laziness and motivate them to study. Encouraging in different ways, creating areas of success for the student and using natural motivations can be effective (Jalali, 2014). On the other hand, the role of counselors can be effective in ensuring the mental health of students. Students are mentally healthy if they first consider themselves a valuable and respectable person and are confident in their abilities. He does not have the ability to stand up to the pressures and is unable to solve problems logically and thoughtfully and has a disturbed mental balance. Such a student needs counseling to solve the problem and restore balance. Counselors are one of the effective factors in providing mental health to students in schools. The exact separation and demarcation between academic guidance and counseling and other dimensions of guidance and counseling, including educational-career and professional guidance and counseling, is not principled or logical.Students' problems are a chain of individual and social factors that require a comprehensive and systematic view of talents and abilities and interests-personality-structure and family status and other environmental variables. Knowing the close relationship between academic problems and students' psychological and social backgrounds, the school counselor helps students by using texts and methods of guidance and counseling through various individual, group and family methods, so that they can choose the appropriate solution or solutions and plan for their implementation through comprehensive investigations of the problem and finally improve the performance of students in various dimensions. (Jalali, 2014). Statement of the problem

There is no doubt that along with the expansion of society and the complexity of its institutions, problems arise and new things are needed that were not felt before. For example, in complex societies, social relations become looser and people lose their emotional solidarity, which in some cases can solve the problem of mental discomfort; So that many families live side by side without knowing each other and sharing in each other's sorrows and joys. In the family institution, due to the increase in the level of work problems of parents and the responsibility of each family member in their own affairs, the relationships of family members and their interests and emotional dependence on each other also lose their strength and intensity, and parents have less opportunity to listen to their children's heartaches. As a result, parents' expectations from the school and the education system of the society increase, and parents more than ever want the school to take over some of their responsibilities by providing special services (Shafi Abadi, Naseri, 1388).

One of the appropriate ways to fight against the unrest of the century and social problems is to start correcting problems and changing undesirable behaviors from the young generation - that is, school students. The existing educational system needs a wide and comprehensive change, nowadays a large group of teachers act like a machine and introduce students to a handful of principles and facts, and there is little harmony and adaptation between the realities of life and the principles learned. It does not exist in schools, due to the fact that education and training should prepare students for real life, the counselor with the help of other school staff can help students in understanding and applying what they have learned and propose and implement appropriate changes in educational and training programs. To understand the value and importance of counseling in the educational system, we analyze the flow of students' learning. According to Hilgard and Barrow[1] (1975), learning is a relatively stable change in potential behavior that is not an accident of growth. To fulfill this definition, first of all, information or experiences must be prepared and then presented by a person who is knowledgeable and familiar with the work - for example, a teacher - and then presented. The consultant can help the teacher in preparing and presenting subjects and facilitate learning, secondly, the learner has enough talent and interest in learning to be able to receive and use the information provided. Of course, if the learner has problems, he will not be able to learn. In this context, the counselor helps the learner and facilitates the learning process by solving problems and recognizing the desires and talents. Unfortunately, sometimes some people think that learning has only one dimension, and that is the presentation of information or the suggestion of new experiences by the teacher to the students. In this case, the best teacher is the one who makes the most information available to the students in the shortest possible time. We must admit that most of our teachers in the educational system have been very successful in doing things in this dimension, and as a result, the number and volume of lessons is constantly increasing, and new educational aids are introduced to the educational system every day to teach more content and in a better way. Few teachers think to themselves that what is the purpose of providing all this information and reservations to students? And what should students do with all this mental information? In teacher training centers, more efforts are made to teach future teachers how to convey the information and content of textbooks to students.