The effect of motivational interviewing basic principles based psychoeducation program on the levels of secondary school students' school burnout and school alienation

Education is a long and difficult process. During this process, many undesired situations are encountered in the school environment. The presence of these conditions make the functioning of the process difficult and makes it difficult to achieve the targeted achievements. When we look at the studies about undesirable behaviors and attitudes in school settings, it is seen that these situations have resulted in violence, bulliying, academic failure, communication problems, school absenteeism and finally school dropout. School burnout and alienation are two important situations that need to be understood in terms of their consequences in the school environment. In both cases, undesirable behaviors which mentioned above, can be exhibited in the school environments. For this reason, it is important to understand the cases of school burnout and student alienation in the school to recognize and intervene before they cause any negative consequences. In this study, a psychoeducation program was developed to interfere with secondary school students' school burnout and school alienation. This program was applied to students of 6th and 7th grade in a secondary school and the results of the program were evaluated. The study is an experimental study with experimental and control groups, pre-test, post-test and follow-up test. At the beginning of the study, School Alienation Scale and School Burnout Scale were applied to 6th and 7th grade students who were attending to Van Hacı Ömer Sabancı Secondary School. After the pre-test, the students with high levels of school burnout and school alienation scores were determined, and these students were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. After the formation of the groups, a psychoeducation programme was implemented to the experimental group for 8 weeks. This psychoeducation programme consists of 8 sessions and each session is between 75 and 90 minutes on average. Different activities and applications were implemented according to each session content. To the control group, film watching and reading activities were conducted. At the end of the psychoeducation process, both scales were applied again. According to the statistical results of the post-test, school burnout and school alienation scores of experimental group showed a significant decrease. However, there was no significant change in the control group. According to this, it was concluded that the psychoeducation process influences students' school burnout and the school alienation. A follow-up test was administered to the students in the experimental and control groups 4 months after the post-test. According to the results of the follow-up test, school burnout and school alienation levels of the students in the experimental group showed a persistence. However, it was found that the students in the control group showed a significant decrease in school burnout scores from the post-test to follow-up test, but there was no significant change in the level of alienation.