Online Learning Stress and Chinese College Students’ Academic Coping during COVID-19: The Role of Academic Hope and Academic Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Colleges around the world have adopted emergency online learning to continue with teaching and learning activities during COVID-19. Existing research has indicated that this teaching mode is perceived negatively by many college students. The difficulty students encounter in emergency online learning can adversely affect their mental health and academic performance. To shed further light on how emergency online learning may have impeded college students’ academic functioning and adjustment, this study examined the association between online learning stress and academic coping and the mediating roles of academic self-efficacy and academic hope. It was conducted in early 2021, a year after the outbreak of the pandemic. Ninety-nine Chinese college students in Hong Kong were recruited and they completed an online questionnaire for this study. Results showed that online learning stress was negatively associated with approach academic coping and social support seeking, and the associations were mediated by academic hope. On the other hand, online learning stress was positively associated with avoidance academic coping, which was not mediated by academic hope. The mediation effects of academic self-efficacy were all non-significant. In sum, college students used more passive and maladaptive coping to handle academic problems when they experienced more online learning stress, and this was partly explained by lower levels of academic hope.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• online learning
• stress and coping
• hope
• self-efficacy

Author contributions

The first author designed the study, reviewed literature, conducted data analyses, and prepared and revised the manuscript. The second author designed the study, reviewed literature, and collected the data. All authors have contributed to and have approved the final manuscript.

Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Department of Psychology, the University of Hong Kong, and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Consent for publication

Consent for publication was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data and code availability statement

Data files associated with this study are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare they have no conflict of interest.

Ethics approval

The study obtained ethics approval from the Department of Psychology, the University of Hong Kong.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Author Notes

Wai-lap Lance Wong is a demonstrator and a part-time PhD candidate at the Department of Psychology, the University of Hong Kong.

Ka-wai Anna Yuen was an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong when she worked on this research project.

Notes

1 In Hong Kong, an undergraduate degree usually takes four to five years to complete.

2 Since perceived stress can be a result of the coping process, we conducted another analysis in which academic coping was used to predict online learning stress (with the same covariates) to test the possible total effect of coping on stress. Results indicated none of the three academic coping variables had a significant total effect on online learning stress (βs ranged from .01 to .19 in absolute value, ps > .05) when the covariates were statistically controlled.