A Study On Effectiveness Of Sandplay Therapy On Intervention For Test Anxiety Of Junior High School Students

Test anxiety is a kind of intricate emotional response to test event, which interacts among individual cognitive reaction, physiological arousal, and behavioral expression during the test preparation, performance, and reflection phases.In sandplay process, the client is given the possibility, by means of miniatures and the arrangement of the sand in the sandbox, to set up a world corresponding to his or her inner state, such as garden or landscape. In this manner, through free and creative play, individual releases his or her negative emotion and feeling, excitates the psyche self-healing power, and achieves self-realization.This study measured, and evaluated effectiveness of sandplay therapy in the alleviation of test anxiety of junior high school students. In particular, it sought to identify whether sandplay therapy was a more effective means to alleviate students' test anxiety than the widely-used, traditional relaxation training. The equal-group research design comprised both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative research: Measures of test anxiety were obtained from the Cassady's Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale (CTAS) before and after the interventions, and participants' pulse rates immediately before and after they participated in each session of sandplay therapy or relaxation training, and the results of the different groups were compared. The qualitative research: We sought to identify the effectiveness in the alleviation of test anxiety by the description and comment about the sandplay therapy processes of test anxiety students, such as the transformation of sandplay contents, themes, ego-images, and so on.Conclusions: (1)The data revealed that individual and group spontaneous sandplay, and relaxation training can alleviate test anxiety levels effectively. (2) Individual and group spontaneous sandplay can release participants' negative emotion and reduce their pulse rates markedly.(3)The results indicated that retention of the effectiveness of individual and group spontaneous sandplay therapy was better than that of the relaxation training.(4) Sandplay productions of high-test-anxiety-students represented the growing process of their psyche.(5) Neither sandplay therapy nor relaxation training can enhance high-test-anxiety-students' test performance in short term.