The Effects of Bibliotherapy-Based Class Meetings on Students’ Self-Concept and Perceptions of Peers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if students’ self-concept and perception of peers would be impacted positively by implementing daily bibliotherapy-based class meetings over a four-week period. This study utilized a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design with no control group. The researcher hypothesized that there would be no significant change in self-concept or perception of peers based on the intervention. Data were collected using a pre- and post-intervention survey and daily student reflections. After completing the intervention, students demonstrated improvement in the areas of self-concept and peer perceptions, and all five null hypotheses were rejected, suggesting most notably that ratings of selves and peers increased, and gains in peer ratings were statistically significantly higher than gains in self-ratings. Self-ratings were higher at pre and post testing intervals (32.591 and 34.455, respectively) than ratings of peers (21.091 and 26.909, respectively), although t-tests revealed that the mean gains for both self (3.994) and peer (5.395) ratings increased statistically significantly over the study. The significant increase in ratings of peers may indicate that bibliotherapy has implications for enhancing peer relations as well as students’ self-concepts. Further research appears warranted to learn more about the nature of the potential benefits of bibliotherapy-based meetings in the classroom for more diverse samples.