94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good
Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.
Find out more
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Positive Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1555364
Hope Therapy Brings Hope: An Empirical Study of a Curriculum Intervention to Enhance School Adaptation of Chinese High School Freshmen
Provisionally accepted- 1School of Teacher Development, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China
- 2Renhuai No.6 High School, Zunyi, China
- 3Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, Beijing, China
- 4Bijie Education Science Research Institute, Bijie, China
- 5Karamay School Attached To Beijing Normal University, Karamay, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Adolescents often face significant school adaptation challenges during the school transition period, which may negatively affect their academic performance, emotional well-being, and long-term development. This study examined the empirical effects of an 8-week mental health intervention curriculum based on hope therapy in enhancing school adaptation with freshmen students in a high school in Guizhou Province, China. A pretest conducted at three time points found that the natural stabilization time for freshmen school adaptation was the ninth week after enrollment. A subsequent formal intervention experiment used a pre-and post-test randomized group control design to divide 444 students into matched experimental and control groups. The experimental group participated in eight psychological intervention sessions based on hope therapy, and the control group received regular mental health lessons. Results showed that the experimental group's hope level and school adaptation significantly increased after the intervention, not only exceeding those of the pre-intervention level, but also significantly higher than those of the control group. The results of longitudinal cross -lagged modeling further suggested that the hope level measured at the baseline and the hope level measured at the subsequent time point significantly predicted school adaptation. This indicates that different time -point measurements of hope level play a role in predicting school adaptation, although the model does not directly reflect the change process between them. while the reverse effect was not significant. This study supports the validity and applicability of hope therapy in improving adolescents' school adaptation and provides new intervention perspectives and practice guidelines for high school mental health education.
Keywords: Hope therapy, School adaptation, high school freshmen, mental health curriculum, mental health education
Received: 04 Jan 2025; Accepted: 10 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Deng, Yang, Li, Wei and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yan Li, School of Teacher Development, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.