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Background or Context:The COVID-19 pandemic may be considered a focusing event that has drawn greater attention to the physical and mental health of community college students. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study:This study examined community college students’ self-reported life stressors pre- and post-pandemic-onset to identify any reported differences, both in occurrence and in impact on course completion. Research Design:Surveys were collected after the COVID-19 pandemic onset at the City University of New York’s largest community college. The 529 students enrolled in STEM subjects were asked about potentially stressful life events experienced during spring 2020 and how strongly these impacted the time or energy they had for their studies (response rate 88.2%). Conclusions or Recommendations:Students’ reporting of the presence of life stressors, as well as their rating of the impact on their studies, were significantly predictive of subsequent course outcomes. However, stressors reported as beginning prior to the pandemic had a larger and more significant relationship with course outcomes than those reported as beginning after pandemic onset. Further, stressors were already highly prevalent prepandemic, with over three-quarters of students reporting them. Although the pandemic may have drawn attention to the existence and impact of stressors, it may simply be a focusing event that drew heightened attention to a pre-existing issue. Results from this study indicate that life stress may significantly impact the outcomes of community college students even outside of pandemic conditions, suggesting that this is a critical area for community colleges to address.
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External Stressors and Time Poverty among online students: An exploratory study.
In this exploratory study, we report results from interviews with 49 students at a large public urban university in the US who enrolled in at least one course online. In line with the literature, many students cited work or family reasons for enrolling in an online course. However, when asked at the end of the interview whether there were any other life events that impacted the time and energy that they had for their studies, 73% of the students cited at least one additional external stressor, and many of them cited up to three or four different categories of external stressors. These included illness/disability, death in the family, caretaking responsibilities, and housing instability, among others. One particularly striking result is that 89% of the external stressors reported by students in response to the final questions of the interview had not been volunteered by students when they were originally asked why they enrolled online or what factors impacted their course outcomes—this suggests that the prevalence of these more complex environmental factors may go underreported in studies that do not ask about them explicitly.
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- PAR ID:
- 10248706
- Editor(s):
- Kucina Softic, S.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the EDEN 2020 Annual Conference. Timisoara, Romania: European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN).
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 172-183
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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