Background & Aims: The feeling of attachment to school has been described in the scientific literature with other titles such as commitment to school, connection with school, and attachment to school, which has multiple effects on the personal and educational aspects of students. On the other hand, the feeling of belonging to the school is about how the students feel about the interaction with their school and what attitude and attachment they have with their peers, teachers, and the teaching staff of the school. Although the feeling of connection with the school is necessary in all educational periods, it becomes more important during the teenage years, and the lack of it in students causes a large amount of behavioral, emotional, and educational problems that require Serious interventions to change and improve conditions be Students who have a good academic progress pay more attention and focus on the issues and topics targeted for learning. In the history of education and learning, traces of various strategies can be seen to smooth and achieve educational goals, among them is the training of empowering executive functions and the training of emotion regulation skills to facilitate the flow of learning in students. reach Such students work hard, but individual intervening factors such as anxiety have a significant impact on their efficiency and results. In the process of improving the cognitive and behavioral status of students, it is possible to mention the techniques related to the training of empowering executive functions and the training of emotion regulation skills. Executive function empowerment training includes a wide range of empowerment methods and strengthening of cognitive processes and behavioral abilities such as problem-solving ability, attention, reasoning, organization, planning, active memory, inhibitory control, arousal control, memory retention, and change of intent. And response inhibition is due to specific techniques. On the other hand, the training of emotion regulation skills reflects the use of several cognitive processes or functional coping skills (such as functional inhibition and flexibility in attention) to correctly respond to emotion and adapt more effectively to the environment. The training of reflective emotion regulation skills is the re-interpretation of environmental stimuli to generate emotion, which causes people to adjust and adjust their emotional responses to the environment. The sense of belonging to the school in the students will be created as a result of the process of emotional involvement and emotional maturity in the school environment, in such a way that the emotional factors and the sense of belonging strengthen each other. The present study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of executive function empowerment training and emotion regulation skills training on the sense of belonging in a school for teenagers referring to the counseling center of the Martyrs and Veterans Foundation of Babol City.
Methods: The method of this research was a semi-experimental pre-test-post-test type with an unequal control group. The statistical population of the current research was made up of all adolescent girls aged 15 to 16 who were referred to the consulting center of Martyrs and Martyrs Foundation of Babol City in the academic year of 2022-2023. Several 45 people were selected according to the criteria for entering the research and were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group, 15 people each. To collect the data, the sense of belonging to the school questionnaire was used by Barry et al. (2004). The summary of executive function empowerment training sessions taken from Barkley (1997) in 10 60-minute sessions and the summary of emotion regulation skills training sessions from Gross (2007) in 10 90-minute sessions were conducted on experimental groups. There was no intervention for the control group. Repeated measurement variance analysis was used in SPSS18 software to analyze the data.
Results: According to the results of the research, the hypothesis that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of executive function empowerment training and emotion regulation skills training on the sense of belonging to the school of teenagers referring to the counseling center of the Martyrs Foundation and Affairs of Babol city was confirmed. These findings are in line with the results of Taheri et al., and Badri Gregari et al. In the explanation of this finding, it can be stated that executive function empowerment training and emotion regulation skills training have differences in their effectiveness on the sense of belonging to the school. Executive function empowerment training has a greater effect on the feeling of belonging to the school compared to emotion regulation skills training. The training to empower executive functions can be compared to the training of emotion regulation skills, because cognition takes precedence over behavior, and behavior management is done as a result of effective cognitive function, on the other hand, the sense of belonging is also considered a social communication behavior, so training Empowerment of executive functions is more effective in reducing the feeling of belonging to the school. Another reason for this is that executive functions include a set of cognitive skills that help a person plan, organize, focus, control social interactions, and improve problem-solving. The findings showed that executive function empowerment training and emotion regulation skills training were effective in the sense of belonging to the school of teenagers referring to the counseling center of the Martyrs and Veterans Foundation of Babol City (P ≤ 0.01). Executive function empowerment training was more effective than emotion regulation skills training on the sense of belonging to the school.
Conclusion: The findings showed that executive function empowerment training and emotion regulation skills training were effective on the sense of belonging to the school of teenagers referring to the consulting center of the Martyr and Veteran Affairs Foundation of Babol city. The findings of this research can provide practical implications to therapists and counselors.