NCT04861116: AcAdeMiC

AcAdeMiC: Acting With Acceptance, Mindfulness and Compassion to Overcome Test/Exam Anxiety

Completed NA Last updated 2 December 2022

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Intervention program for test anxiety in Adolescents in 64 participants. Completed in 31 July 2022.

Timeline

15 March 2021

Primary endpoint
31 July 2022

31 July 2022

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	University of Coimbra
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	parallel
Masking	none
Primary purpose	treatment
Enrollment	64
Start date	15 March 2021
Primary completion	31 July 2022
Estimated completion	31 July 2022
Sites	1 location across Portugal

Drugs / interventions tested

• Intervention program for test anxiety

Conditions studied

• Adolescents — all drugs for Adolescents →
• Test Anxiety — all drugs for Test Anxiety →

Sponsor

University of Coimbra

Who can join

Adults 13 to 18, any sex, with Adolescents or Test Anxiety. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

Test Anxiety is a highly prevalent and impairing condition in adolescents (i.e., 9th to 12th grade students), significantly impacting on their mental health and well-being. Among Portuguese university students, test anxiety is the primary reason for seeking specialized psychological support, suggesting the importance of early intervention.

Test anxiety associates to low self-compassion, acceptance and mindfulness, which have been increasingly acknowledged in literature as important processes to cultivate towards human experience and suffering, within intervention programs, particularly in adolescence, and in anxiety and fear of failure in academic settings.

These processes are covered and enhanced within comprehensive models and evidence-based therapies that adopt an integrative, contextual and biopsychosocial approach, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), as well as an evolutionary approach, such as Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). These approaches focus on receiving internal events (e.g., thoughts, emotions, memories) in an accepting and compassionate way, as part of human experience, without changing them, while developing a sense of vitality, well-being and commitment to valued ends in life, instead of focusing solely or mainly on symptom reduction (although it is usually a consequent outcome).

However, there are no empirically validated therapeutic programs for adolescents with test anxiety promoting these processes combined.

ICT-based interventions are accessible, convenient, cost-effective and have been proved effective in reducing anxiety disorders' symptomatology. Even though there are some empirically validated online interventions for test anxiety in adolescents, having shown promising results, these were mainly self-help/module-based programs, without a clinician facilitating the intervention.

This project aims to develop and implement a 12-week ICT-based targeted, facilitated and manualized individual intervention for adolescent students, developing compassion, acceptance and mindfulness, in order to help improve test anxiety's regulation (and consequently symptom reduction), as well as increase general and school-related well-being, while promoting valued life action.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.