Understanding effects of COVID‐19 on undergraduate academic stress, motivation and coping over time

Abstract

The rapid and unprecedented shift from face-to-face instruction to remote online learning as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on teaching and learning in Higher Education: students had to adapt to a new way of learning, away from typical campus settings and their peers, and to new forms of assessments. This study examined academic stress, learning strategies, motivation and ways of coping from a sample of 177 unique students from a large London university, collecting primary data via survey at three time points during the academic year 2020/21 when teaching was remote and online only.Our findings show how patterns in academic stress, learning strategies, motivation and coping vary over the course of the academic year giving novel insight into how student learning and adaptation to the situation changed over time.We also report on differences in these patterns according to year group and for those students who are the first-infamily to attend university and those who are not. Based on these findings we identify priority areas where higher education institutions should support undergraduate students

Adaptation and validation of the academic motivation scale for higher education across four Eastern European countries

“…However, it is often applied to convenient or intentional (and thus differently deviated) samples (Decius et al., 2022; Gjesfjeld et al., 2008; Grassi‐Oliveira et al., 2014; Lietz et al., 2011; Yan & Lyndon, 2021). The collection of data during the pandemic period could also have caused a certain shift in the results due to the specific situation of the persons examined (as discussed by Fridkin et al., 2023). However, our results do not suggest this.…”