How Has Student Productivity Been Impacted by the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

Undergraduate student productivity is an area of general concern. We define productivity holistically in that it is not simply an individual’s output but rather how an individual manages their life (i.e., their time, their sleep, their creativity, themselves). Because post-secondary requires students to self-regulate and manage their time beyond what they may have experienced in high school (Zimmerman, 1990), students who are new to university may have difficulties adjusting to their newfound self-management responsibilities. Additional, time management and self-regulation are put under threat with novel stressful situations (Strait et al., 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic is considered to be a novel stressful situation and, further, the pandemic has impacted students’ social lives, employment opportunities, and academic delivery potentially impacting students’ overall stress levels (Gallo, L., et al., 2020). Consider that post-secondary students experience higher levels of stress than the general public (Khan et al., 2018), therefore, it stands to reason that the advent of COVID-19 has further increased post-secondary students’ stress (Häfner et al. 2015). Therefore, we expect productivity of students to change, more specifically, to decrease because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. This is preliminary research in order to ascertain to what degree students productivity has decreased and learn from those whose productivity did not decrease, what strategies they were successfully able to incorporate to maintain or increase productivity. The intent is to use this research to adapt the methods of students who were successful in increasing or maintaining their productivity to pre-COVID-19 levels to help inform strategies during future pandemics or other novel situations which would cause stress and place productivity under threat.

Department: Psychology

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Rodney Schmaltz