BOOSTING STUDENTS’ WELL-BEING AND ENGLISH GRAMMAR COMPETENCE THROUGH POSITIVE EDUCATION: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

Supporting students’ well-being and equipping them with the skills necessary to succeed in life was set as one of the 21st-century educational goals (Coleman, 2011). Positive education, unlike the traditional understanding of learning, suggests teaching regular school disciplines along with resilience and social-emotional skills (Seligman, 2011). It is believed that positive education programs integrated into school curricula can increase students’ well-being, teach them how to be perseverant, optimistic about the future, and use their strengths. Bearing this idea in mind, the purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the positive education intervention on their subjective and psychological well-being. Also, being guided by the broaden-and-build theory, which states that an increase in positive emotions can facilitate better learning (Fredrickson, 2001), it was sought to analyze how such a program would influence their academic performance. Using a quantitative quasi-experimental pre-post-test research design, the data was collected two times from experimental and control groups consisting of 12 students in each group. The intervention was run for a week, including five lessons that aimed to strengthen students’ interpersonal relationships, sense of hope, and optimism. The analysis revealed that the positive education program had no effect on the subjective well-being (i.e., happiness) of students. However, the program demonstrated small but statistically significant gains in connectedness and academic achievement in the experimental group. It is argued that a longer duration of the intervention, as well as a more robust program, could have potentially led to more significant outcomes.