Remote Learning, Academic Self-Efficacy, & Academic Performance of College Students During COVID-19 Samantha Ruggiero
Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the day-to-day lives of individuals around the world, particularly students. As a result of the pandemic, remote learning rapidly became commonplace for students of all ages across international borders (Gillis & Krull, 2020; Miller, 2021). While remote learning was considered essential to protect public health during the beginning and middle stages of the pandemic, the widespread transition to this learning system was fraught with challenges for college students, administrators, and professors. Research suggests that many students were dissatisfied with the quality of their remote courses and faced difficulties in maintaining engagement and motivation with course materials (Gillis & Krull, 2020; Miller, 2021), potentially decreasing their levels of academic self-efficacy. As academic self-efficacy is integral to academic performance, the current proposal seeks to investigate the impact of remote learning on college students’ academic self-efficacy and academic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Challenges of Remote Learning During COVID-19 The abrupt shift to remote learning resulted in a variety of obstacles for college students; remote learning led to a collective decline in students’ course satisfaction levels dropping from 87% pre-pandemic to 59% after the transition to remote learning (Miller, 2021). Findings of one study suggest that only 55% of students found live-Zoom lectures to be effective, with only 36% reporting the lectures to be enjoyable (Gillis & Krull, 2020). Moreover, 42% of college students cited staying motivated while taking classes remotely as a challenge (Miller, 2021). Furthermore, half of college students reported facing technical difficulties that disrupted their access to remote learning resources, which further compounded the obstacles associated with remote learning (Gillis & Krull, 2020). In another study, a majority of college students reported concerns about their academic performance during COVID-19 (Son et al., 2020). These findings demonstrate that many students did not feel able to perform at their full academic potential during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the rapid nature of the emergency switch to remote learning during the pandemic, universities struggled to deliver high-quality education to college students (Johnson et al., 2020). For many professors, teaching remotely was an uncharted endeavor; in one national study, over half of college administrators and professors reported that increasing support for students during the transition to remote learning was a high priority to them, indicating a demand for resources to have better-supported college students during the pandemic
(Johnson et al., 2020). Yet, 64% of professors reported having no previous remote teaching experience before the transition to remote learning (Johnson et al., 2020). Furthermore, as of June 2020, only 47% of college and university presidents felt confident in their attempts to train less-experienced faculty members in using remote teaching technologies, and only 55% believed that they were able to uphold high academic standards through remote learning (Miller, 2021). It is, thus, evident that not only have students felt as if the quality of their education was compromised due to the transition to remote learning, but that university administrators and professors did not feel entirely equipped to prepare students to succeed while engaging with remote learning. Academic Self-Efficacy and Academic Performance When exploring online academic learning, it is important to consider the ways in which academic self-efficacy impacts academic performance. Academic self-efficacy, or one’s confidence in their ability to achieve desired academic outcomes (Sharma & Nasa, 2014), has been reported to have a significant and positive relation with academic performance (Honicke & Broadbent, 2016; Sharma & Nasa, 2014; Zajacova et al., 2005). Much of the extant literature in this area emphasizes the importance of academic self-efficacy in the learning process and in predicting academic performance (Honicke & Broadbent, 2016; Schunk & Pajares, 2002; Sharma & Nasa, 2014; Zajacova et al., 2005). In particular, academic self-efficacy has been observed to sustain the initiation and completion of academic goals (Schunk & Pajares, 2002). Research supports that high academic self-efficacy is associated with increased motivation towards academic goal persistence, which is an essential component of academic success (Schunk & Pajares, 2002). The relation between academic self-efficacy and academic performance might be cyclical, such that mastery experiences (i.e., experiences in which the desired outcome is achieved) serve as a source of academic self-efficacy (Bandura, 1994). This means that experiences of academic success, such as getting exceptional grades, may reinforce high levels of academic self-efficacy in students (Bandura, 1994). This hypothesis has been supported by the finding that academic self-efficacy and academic performance are more strongly correlated in new college students at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester, as students accumulate mastery experiences over the course of the semester (Gore Jr., 2006). In another study (Chemers et al., 2001), past academic achievement (i.e., high school GPA) was shown to influence levels of academic self-efficacy in first-year college students, further exhibiting how Proposals | 21
