The effect of psychological skills training (PST) on student engagement in higher education

![CDATA[On account of the change forces impacting on higher education, it is becoming increasingly important to identify and develop strategies that promote student engagement by helping students to cultivate psychological resilience. The aim of this study is to examine whether the Psychological Skills Training (PST) techniques that have been used with success in the field of sport psychology can be applied to the higher learning context as an effective strategy for promoting student engagement and psychological resilience. Twenty-three first year psychology students from the University of Western Sydney were randomly allocated to an experimental group or a wait-list control group. A registered psychologist taught experimental group participants psychological skills in a one-hour psychoeducational workshop. All participants completed both a pre-treatment and a post-treatment set of questionnaires assessing psychological skills, student engagement, state anxiety, test anxiety, and academic self-efficacy. It was hypothesized that the experimental group would, relative to the wait-list control group, demonstrate (i) greater increases in student engagement, and academic self-efficacy, and (ii) greater decreases in state anxiety and test anxiety. No support was found for these hypotheses. The outcome of this study has important implications for investigating the efficacy of PST in higher learning contexts.]]