Higher education students' achievement emotions and their antecedents in e-learning amid COVID-19 pandemic: A multi-country survey

Good performance in difficult times? Threat and challenge as contributors to achievement emotions and academic performance during the COVID-19 outbreak

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most formidable global crises, leading to the disruptions to education systems worldwide and impacting learning attitudes and psychological well-being of various learner groups, including university students. In this context, students' appraisals of adverse learning situations play a key role. It is not just the learning situation, but rather students' appraisal of it which impacts their emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in academic context. The aim of the present study was to investigate how university students' challenge and threat appraisals were related to emotional learning experiences and learning outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the study focuses on the role of personal and external resources for learning in this context.

Methods

Altogether, 428 students, who attended a Psychology lecture at one Austrian university, filled in a questionnaire about their challenge and threat appraisals of learning circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, achievement emotions they experienced during this time as well as gender, proneness to anxiety, academic self-concept, and learning resources. Additionally, students' performance in the examination was recorded.

Results

The structural equation model emphasizes a crucial role of challenge and threat appraisals for students' achievement emotions in learning and exam preparation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenge appraisals were the strongest predictor for pleasant emotions and threat appraisals were strongest predictor for unpleasant emotions. Proneness to anxiety was related to threat appraisal as well as to experience of more unpleasant and, surprisingly, to positive emotions in adverse learning situation. Academic self-concept and learning resources were identified as important resources for learning in adverse learning situation. Unpleasant achievement emotions were directly and negatively related to academic performance and may thus be seen as a critical variable and crucial obstacle to academic performance.

Discussion

The present study provides implications for learning and instructions which could be implemented by universities in order to support learning and learning attitudes among university students in adverse learning situations.

A new conceptual model to investigate the role of hospital's capabilities on sustainable learning

The health-care industry is in a state of constant flux, with new challenges and opportunities emerging regularly. Hospitals, as the cornerstone of health-care delivery, must adapt and embrace change to provide optimal patient care. One crucial aspect that plays a significant role in the success of hospitals is sustainable learning. Sustainable learning refers to acquiring knowledge, skills, and competencies that enable health-care professionals to adapt to changes, implement best practices, and deliver high-quality care. Sustainable learning, a concept gaining prominence, emphasizes the ability of hospitals to learn from experiences and adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining quality health-care delivery. This article aims to investigate the role of hospital capabilities in sustainable learning and explore how hospitals can foster an environment that promotes continuous learning and development. Another goal of the paper is to test the relationships between cultural capabilities, structural capabilities, knowledge management capabilities, Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, top management support, application capabilities, and sustainable learning. The Partial Least-Squares (PLS) algorithm was performed using SmartPLS 3.0 to attain this goal. The results successfully support the study goals. This study verified that cultural capability, structural capabilities, knowledge management capabilities, IT infrastructure, top management support, and application capabilities positively affected sustainable learning. This investigation contributes to hospital, management, and education research by developing an integrated paradigm for sustainable learning. In conclusion, the new conceptual model presented here provides a robust framework for investigating the role of hospital capabilities in sustainable learning. By understanding and improving their capabilities, hospitals can not only adapt to change but also thrive in an ever-changing health-care landscape.

Big Five personality traits and coping strategies of Italian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave

Introduction

Little is known about the role personality traits may have played for university students in diminishing and compensating for the negative impact of COVID-19 in its early phases, promoting adaptive coping. University students represent a population which was consistently obliged to follow social distance rules due to the early shift of many organizations from face-to-face to online learning. Therefore, it is worth exploring whether the Big Five traits acted as risk or protective factors after the outbreak of a disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic for Italian university students.

Methods

We involved a sample of 2,995 university students who completed an online survey in March 2020. We measured the Big Five personality traits through the Big Five Inventory-2-XS and their coping strategies through the Robust-Pandemic Coping Scale. The latter assessed four COVID-19-related coping dimensions, namely Despair (e.g., including helplessness and feeling lack of control), Aversion (e.g., referring to oppositive strategies), Proactivity (e.g., comprising problem solving and information seeking), and Adjustment (e.g., concerning reappraisal and assertiveness).

Results

Preliminarily, two Linear Mixed Models indicated that university students had higher scores in Conscientiousness, followed by Open-Mindedness, and then Agreeableness. These three traits were, in turn, higher than Extraversion and Negative Emotionality, which did not differ among them. Concerning coping, university students reacted more frequently utilizing adaptive strategies (with Proactivity used more frequently than Adjustment) rather than maladaptive strategies (with Despair higher than Aversion). A Path Analysis examining the relations between the Big Five traits and the four coping dimensions showed that Negative Emotionality can be considered as a risk factor, and that Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Open-Mindedness can be conceptualized as protective factors. More interestingly, we found that Extraversion entailed both a risk and a protective role for Italian university students after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion

Notwithstanding limitations, these findings can be the basis for developing disaster preparation and prevention actions, aiming at promoting students' positive coping towards current and future disasters.

Children and adolescents coping with home isolation and social distancing during Covid-19 in Qatar: a cross sectional study with qualitative items

BACKGROUND

Covid-19 related studies report psychological impacts during home isolation and social distancing. Despite that, children and adolescents were able to adopt coping strategies that assisted in lowering severe levels of psychological disorders. This study aims to report on the psychosocial implications of social distancing and isolation on children of different nationalities who reside in Qatar, and to reveal their coping ways.

METHODS

This is a cross sectional study with qualitative component at its end. The study is a part of a larger study that reported the results of a national screening for psychological disorders experienced by children and adolescents in Qatar. A bilingual online questionnaire included close-ended and one open-ended question to screen for psychological changes and identify coping strategies practiced by children and adolescents (7-18 years) during home-isolation and social distancing. The quantitative questionnaire had five main sections as follows: the sociodemographic characteristics, Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale, and Clinical Anger Scale). The last section screened for eight different coping strategies. The summative content analysis was used to analyze the open-ended question "What practices do you do at home that make you happy?". First, open coding was used (for identification), followed by the axial coding (for comparison), and lasted by sorting of coping strategies inductively.

RESULTS

Six thousand six hundred and eight (6608) subjects participated between June 23 and July 18, 2020. The clinical outcomes of the study had varying prevalence and levels of severity, which ranged from mild to severe. Higher prevalence was noted for adjustment disorder 66.5% (n = 4396), and generalized anxiety 60% (n = 3858), in comparison to depression 40% (n = 2588). Additionally, participants reported using cognitive, spiritual, social, and physical coping strategies. Eight higher order themes were identified to reflect the coping strategies: playing with siblings or pets, gardening, cooking, practicing arts and crafts, and doing chores. Furthermore, Sociodemographic factors such as ethnicity, religion and family status played a considerable role in choosing the type of coping strategy.

CONCLUSION

The uniqueness of the study is bringing the psychosocial implications of social distancing through the voices of children and adolescents, and coping strategies from their perspective. These results are of importance for educational and healthcare systems that are recommended to collaborate even in "normal" times to prepare these age categories for any future crises. The importance of daily lifestyle and family is highlighted as protectors, and crucial factors in emotional management.

MOTEMO-OUTDOOR: ensuring learning and health security during the COVID-19 pandemic through outdoor and online environments in higher education

The restriction measures put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic posed notable challenges for formal teaching-learning processes because they had to be adapted to ensure health security. An active learning programme applied to three environments (indoors, outdoors, and online) was tested with 273 undergraduate university students in a within-subjects experimental study. Each student was assigned to two indoor and two outdoor seminars, with a subsample (n = 30) also participating in online seminars implemented in response to the university's lockdown protocols. The learning experience and learning conditions were evaluated through six dimensions: learning, evaluative impact, hedonic experience, technical conditions, environmental conditions, and health security. Outdoor seminars were more effective than indoor seminars in terms of the learning experience, with greater differences in hedonic experience, while the indoor seminars were rated more highly than the outdoor seminars in terms of learning conditions, with a larger difference in the environmental conditions. No differences were found between online and face-to-face environments in terms of the learning experience, even though the online environment yielded better scores in the learning conditions. Apparently, this adaptation to both outdoor and online contexts through active methodologies allows overcoming of technical, environmental, and teaching limitations and improves health security, while ensuring a good learning experience and added flexibility to teaching-learning processes.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10984-023-09456-y.

The relation between autonomy support and music enjoyment in online learning for music undergraduates in the post-COVID-19 era

Music enjoyment is considered to predict music-related academic performance and career choice. Although relevant research in non-music fields has demonstrated the association between teachers' autonomy support and students' academic enjoyment, it remains unknown whether this association is valid in the music discipline. In addition, in the post-COVID-19 era, online education has become a common way of teaching and learning for music undergraduates. In the form of online learning, the mechanisms mediating teachers' music autonomy support and students' music academic enjoyment are also unknown. This study draws on Pekrun's theory of achievement emotions and control values to explore the mediating role of attributions and values in the association between autonomous support and academic achievement. In this study, 270 undergraduates majoring in music eventually completed the online surveys. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that autonomy support positively predicted music enjoyment and that attributions (i.e., internal attribution and external attribution) and values (i.e., intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value) mediated the association between autonomy support and music enjoyment. The findings also provide insights into possible avenue for promoting music enjoyment emotion during online teaching in the post-COVID-19 era. Implications and limitations are discussed in the study.

Eighteen Months of COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Lenses of Self or Others: A Meta-Analysis on Children and Adolescents' Mental Health

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic can have a serious impact on children and adolescents' mental health. We focused on studies exploring its traumatic effects on young people in the first 18 months after that the pandemic was declared, distinguishing them also according to the type of informants (self-report and other-report instruments).

Objective

We applied a meta-analytic approach to examine the prevalence of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and psychological distress among children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic, considering the moderating role of kind of disorder and/or symptom, type of instrument, and continent.

Method

We used PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus databases to identify articles on the COVID-19 pandemic, applying the following filters: participants until 20 years of age, peer-review, English as publication language. Inclusion required investigating the occurrence of disorders and/or symptoms during the first 18 months of the pandemic. The search identified 26 publications.

Results

The meta-analysis revealed that the pooled prevalence of psychological disorders and/or symptoms for children and adolescents, who were not affected by mental health disturbances before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, was .20, 95% CI [.16, .23]. Moreover, we found a moderating role of type of instrument: occurrence was higher for self-report compared to other-report instruments.

Conclusions

The study presented an analysis of the psychological consequences for children and adolescents of the exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic, soliciting further research to identify factors underlying resilience. Notwithstanding limitations such as the small number of eligible articles and the fact that we did not examine the role of further characteristics of the studies (such as participants' age or design), this meta-analysis is a first step for future research documenting the impact of such an unexpected and devastating disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic.