The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly affected the educational process worldwide, forcing teachers and students to transfer to an online teaching and learning format. Compared with the traditional face-to-face teaching methods, teachers’ professional role, career satisfaction level, and digital literacy have been challenged in the COVID-19 health crisis. To conduct a systematic review, we use critical appraisal tools from the University of the West of England Framework We removed the irrelevant and lower-quality results to refine the results and scored each selected paper to get high-quality studies with STARLITE. The number of finally included studies is 21. We used the PICO mnemonic to structure the four components of a clinical question, i.e., the relevant patients or population groups, the intervention (exposure or diagnostic procedure) of interest, as well as against whom the intervention is being compared and considered appropriate (outcomes). We formulated five research questions regarding teachers’ professional role, satisfaction, digital literacy, higher educational practice, and sustainable education. The study found that teachers’ professional roles changed complicatedly. Moreover, they were assigned more tasks during the online teaching process, which also implicated a decline in teachers’ satisfaction. After the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to conduct a blended teaching model in educational institutes. Teachers should have adequate digital literacy to meet the new needs of the currently innovative educational model in the future. In addition, the study reveals that teachers’ digital literacy level, career satisfaction, and professional role are significantly correlated. We measured to what degree the three factors affected the online teaching and learning process. Ultimately, the study may provide some suggestions for methodological and educational strategies. 

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Teachers’ Satisfaction, Role, and Digital Literacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study was supported by RD R&D Project UAL18-SEJ-DO31-A-FEDER. University of Almeria (Spain), and the European Social Fund (EU).

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Resilience as a Buffering Variable Between the Big Five Components and Factors and Symptoms of Academic Stress at University

The rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide was accompanied by intense fears, confusion, worries, anger, and stress threatening people’s mental health. Unprecedented measures to slow down and prevent the transmission of COVID-19 have had various impacts on the population’s health behaviour and mental health. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the lockdown’s effects on university students’ mental health in Romania. Based on a cross-sectional design, the survey data were collected from a sample of 722 participants (247 males; M = 21.1 years; SD ± 1.73). A path analysis was performed to verify the hypothesised direct and indirect effects included in the multiple mediation model. The findings showed a positive association between stress and boredom proneness, missing daily social interactions, spending more time on phone conversations, and the increasing interest in following news about the pandemic. The path analysis revealed an excellent fit between the proposed multiple mediation model and the sample data. Boredom proneness and missing daily social interactions both affected stress, directly and indirectly, through more time spent on phone conversations. In addition, it was found that the increased interest in following news about the pandemic mediated the relationship between boredom proneness and perceived stress. In terms of gender differences, our findings revealed that female students experienced significantly higher stress levels than male students, perceived to a greater extent the lack of daily social interactions, and spent more time on phone conversations. Overall, the findings further extend the empirical evidence on university students’ mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, universities need to organise support programmes focused on developing university students’ coping strategies to maintain their mental health even in adverse contexts.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8599/pdf

Post-Lockdown Effects on Students' Mental Health in Romania: Perceived Stress, Missing Daily Social Interactions, and Boredom Proneness.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (1986) influenced the development of several complementary models of the construct of Self-Regulation. Building on the foundation of Self-Determination Theory, SDT (2000), and Zimmerman's Self-Regulation Theory, SR (2001), with their assumptions, contributions, goddesses, and limitations, we come to the Self- vs. External Regulatory Theory, SR-ER (2021). Finally, we integrate recent evidence demonstrating the explanatory adequacy of the SR vs. ER model for different psychological constructions in different settings related to education, health, clinical practice and social work. Complementary, a new theoretical and empirical research agenda is presented, to continue testing the adequacy of SR vs. ER assumptions, and to better understand the behavioral variability of the different constructs studied.

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Advances on Self-Regulation Models: A New Research Agenda Through the SR vs ER Behavior Theory in Different Psychology Contexts

The main aim of the present research is to analyze the predictive value of individual characteristics such as online self-efficacy, adaptability to uncertainty, and sources of stress during online learning on learning engagement. We also aimed to highlight if these relationships could be mediated by the online self-regulated learning strategies, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were 529 university students and the design was cross-sectional. The results showed significant associations of the sources of stress in online learning with self-efficacy, leaning engagement and self-regulated learning strategies. Self-regulated strategies—task strategies and goal setting represent mediators of stressors perceived by the students under the conditions of the sudden shift to online activity and online learning engagement. The most relevant self-regulation strategies seemed to be goal setting and task strategies, which confirm the need for a clear structure of learning in the context of online activities. The implications of this study reside in the increased awareness regarding how learning engagement in online learning can be predicted by individual characteristics.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867122/pdf

Predictors of Learning Engagement in the Context of Online Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have required substantial adjustments in terms of university teaching-learning processes. The aim of this study was to verify whether there were significant differences between the academic year of 2020 and the two preceding years in factors and symptoms and stress. A total of 642 university students (ages 18-25 years) participated by filling out validated self-reports during the months from March to August 2020. Using an ex post facto design, SEM analyses and simple and multiple ANOVAs were performed. Structural results showed that stress factors from the teaching process had a predictive value for the learning process, emotions, and academic burnout, and being a man was a factor predicting negative emotion. In a similar way, inferential results revealed no significant effect of academic year but did show an effect of gender on stress experiences during the pandemic. Aside from certain specific aspects, there was no significant global effect of the year 2020 on factors and symptoms of stress. The results showed that studying in the year of the COVID-19 outbreak did not have a significant effect on stress triggered by the teaching process. From these results, we draw implications for specific guidance interventions with university teachers and students.

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Raquel Artuch-Garde

Papers

How Has the COVID-19 Crisis Affected the Academic Stress of University Students? The Role of Teachers and Students