نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 گروه ترویج و آموزش کشاورزی، دانشکده کشاورزی و منابعطبیعی، دانشگاه سراوان، سراوان، ایران. سازمان تحقیقات، آموزش و ترویج کشاورزی- مرکز تحقیقات و آموزش کشاورزی و منابعطبیعی استان مرکزی. اراک. ایران
2 گروه ترویج و آموزش کشاورزی، دانشکده کشاورزی و منابعطبیعی، دانشگاه سراوان، سراوان، ایران
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
With the spread of the Corona virus worldwide, the way of teaching in universities has changed and, of course, the mental health and quality of life of students has been affected. Following this trend, the educational status of students during the quarantine and social distance was changed and affected by mental health conditions and quality of life. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of students' mental health and quality of life during the corona on their educational status. This study was performed among students in southeastern universities, Sistan and Baluchistan province (N = 30.217). The sample was 310 students in different fields and levels of education using stratified random sampling. The evaluation tool of this study was an online questionnaire whose face and content validity was confirmed by experts in the field of psychology and behavior. The findings showed a positive and significant relationship between mental health variables and students 'academic status and also the results of structural equation modeling analysis indicate the strong predictive power of mental health and quality of life variables on students' academic status.
کلیدواژهها [English]
Extended Abstract
Objectives
Given the effect of COVID-19 on the students’ mental health and quality of life, this research aimed to explore the students’ mental health and quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic and shed light on the effect of these two parameters on their academic achievement. The students’ academic achievement was measured by such indicators as learning quality and efficiency, academic motivation, accomplishment of academic goals, connection with teachers and class participation, and access to online classes. Indeed, all four pillars of an educational system, including trainer (connection with teachers and class participation), trainee (academic motivation and learning quality and efficiency), material (accomplishment of academic goals), and educational setting (access to online classes) were considered as required.
Methods
The statistical population was composed of all students of the universities in southeast Iran including the University of Sistan and Baluchistan (N = 21,217), Velayat University of Iranshahr (N = 7,500), and Higher Education Complex of Saravan (N = 1,500) at undergraduate, postgraduate, and Ph.D. levels in different disciplines. The statistical sample was estimated by the formula of estimating the average of a quantitative trait in descriptive studies and was taken by the stratified sampling technique with the proportional allocation (n = 310).
Data were collected with a combination of Walrand’s (1982) academic motivation questionnaire, Diener’s satisfaction with life scale, and corona disease anxiety scale (CDAS) developed by Ahmad Alipour et al. (2019) to determine the corona anxiety level in a clinical sample. The research questionnaire was composed of three sections. Section 1 was related to the student’s demographic information on traits like age, gender, GPA, educational level, field of study, residence during the pandemic, and the effect of COVID-19 on the career and income of the individual and the family. Section 2 collected information on the students’ mental health during the pandemic with the indicators of the students’ stress level (3 items), depression during the quarantine period (3 items), anxiety and sleeping disorder level (4 items), and loneliness state (3 items) and their quality of life with the indicators of emotional health (5 items) and social interactions (5 items). Finally, section 3 addressed the students’ academic status including the indicators of learning quality and efficiency (5 items), accomplishment of academic goals (3 items), academic motivation (3 items), connection with the teachers and participation in online classes (5 items), and access to online classes (4 items). All questions were measured by Likert’s five-point scale. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated at 0.84-0.94 for the micro-scales, and the internal consistency of the whole scale was found to be 0.93, reflecting the reliability of the research instrument. The validity of the instrument was confirmed by a panel of faculty members and relevant experts. The authors used a web-based survey design. All participants expressed their satisfaction with participation before they start to fill out the questionnaire. The participants filled out the questionnaires on the Internet platform Porseline from October 2021 to January 2022. They were allowed to finish the survey whenever they would like.
The data were analyzed using the social science statistical software suite of SPSS ver. 25.0. The analysis included descriptive statistics, e.g., mean, standard deviation (SD), frequencies, and percentages, used to describe the participants’ demographic information. The significance level (p-value) was set at p < 0.05. The research questions were explored by data analysis methods including t-test, two-way analysis of variance, and multivariate analysis of variance to compare the mean demographic characteristics of the participants (gender, family income, and job) and their impact on the quality of life and mental health dimensions. Also, Pearson correlation coefficient was applied to check the correlations between the students’ mental health and life quality dimensions and their academic achievement. Eventually, the relationships of the variables were examined within a model using structural equation modeling (SEM) in the Smart-PLS (ver. 3) software package. The main reasons for the use of SEM are its capability of testing the theories by equations among the variables, determining the causal structure of the hidden variables, including the measurement error, and defining the relationships between the hidden and observed variables within a model.
Results
The results showed that the mental health and life quality of the students were influenced during the COVID-19 pandemic (p < 0.01) so that over half of the participants (61%) experienced symptoms of anxiety and sleeping disorder, stress, depression, and loneliness. The effect of COVID-19 was significant (p < 0.01) and almost over 70 percent on the students’ learning quality and efficiency, accomplishment of academic goals, academic motivation, and connection with teachers and participation in online classes.
The results showed that the quality of life had positive and significant correlations with the students’ academic achievement, learning quality and efficiency, accomplishment of academic goals, academic motivation, connection with teachers and participation in online classes, and access to online classes (r = 0.788, r = 0.609, r = 0.701, r = 0.523, r = 0.186, p < 0.001). On the other hand, the students’ life quality had a positive and significant relationship with mental health (r = 0.478, p < 0.001). It had a negative and significant relationship (r = -0.059, p < 0.001) with the students’ anxiety and sleeping disorder during the pandemic. After the measurement and structural models were confirmed, it was the turn to check the significance of the relationships between the research variables. The statistical significance of the paths was examined by t-value. The relationship is significant if the t-value is greater than 1.96. As is observed in Figure 1, the significance coefficient is 6.35 for the path of mental health and educational achievement and 17.36 for the path of life quality and educational achievement. This means that the two variables of mental health and life quality have positive and significant relationships with the students’ educational achievement. It should also be noted that the relationships of the hidden variables of stress, depression, anxiety, and isolation with the variable of mental health, the relationships of the variables of emotional health and social interactions with life quality, and the relationships of the variables of learning quality, educational motivation, educational goals, connection with teachers, and access to online classes with educational achievement were all significant. This means that the main variables have been accounted for by the dimensions appropriately.
Conclusion
The research aimed to explore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Iranian students’ mental health and life quality. Then, the effects of these two variables were studied on the students’ academic achievement through which the relationships of the variables were presented within a structural equation model.
The students with different study fields, those living with their families vs. those not, the employed students vs. unemployed ones, the students with different financial statuses, and the students from different genders showed significant differences in mental health, but the educational level had no significant effect on their mental health. In another section of the data analysis, it was found that life quality had a significant correlation with the students’ academic achievement, learning quality and efficiency, accomplishment of academic goals, academic motivation, connection with teachers and participation in online classes, and access to online classes.