Exploring the Relationship Between Online Learning Trait Anxiety and Online Learning Academic Behavioural Confidence During COVID-19

Introduction

Over centuries, pandemics have been regarded as a source of serious concerns. However, about two years ago, COVID-19 emerged and turned the tables on everything so far known about pandemics. Not only lives have been under threat but also normalcy, mobility, and education. As a result, severe measures and rigorous actions have been administered by governments worldwide amongst which all education institutions have been mandated to implement unprecedented and across-the-board changes to reconcile the new reality. This transition from the secure, the familiar, the tangible, and the predictable to the wavering, the uncanny, the virtual, and the unexpected, created massive anxiety (Coelho, 2020).

Most recent studies that examined anxiety or online-learning during COVID-19 pandemic presented consistent results as to the negative effects of both on students’ academic performance, and/or academic behavioral confidence (Khoshaim et al., 2020; Sander & de la Fuente, 2020; Son et al., 2021; Browning et al., 2021; Camacho et al., 2021; Talsma et al., 2021; Velazco et al., 2021), sometimes referred to as ‘academic resilience’ (Sander & de la Fuente, 2020). In fact, anxiety has been widely explored by many researchers from numerous disciplines and fields, particularly during the global outbreak of COVID-19. Even in cases where online learning is involved, numerous studies utilize psychological-somatic state anxiety scales (e.g., Zung SAS) intended to gauge state, short-term, and immediate anxiety (few days) to examine long-term customary trait anxiety during a relatively short period of time (Alemany-Arrebola, 2020; Sundarasen et al., 2020; Chynna et al., 2021). By “online learning” we do not refer to all types of remote learning, but only the one that entails synchronous and asynchronous lectures. Moreover, it was our objective to measure online learning trait anxiety that is COVID-19 related rather than measuring each one independently.

Based on the following considerations, we believe that this study contributes to the field:

• 1.

  The study breaks away from previous ones by employing and adapting Seymore Sarason’s trait anxiety measure to determine the relatively long-term anxiety spurred by COVID-19 online learning. Therefore, this study does not only examine students’ anxiety pertinent to their prospective behavior in tests, but also relates to their online learning academic behavioral strategies, the academic assessment of online learning, academic failure, technical problems, communication problems with lecturers, post-pandemic anxiety, and somatic-psychological conditions. More, it espouses the claim that many factors are involved with respect to anxiety and online learning (Stankov et al. 2014). These include but are not limited to, the quality of internet connectivity, courses, instructors, communication, interaction, and frequency of attendance (Song et al., 2019). In fact, discrepancies in these factors among different countries could affect students’ responses that may waver between two extremes, negative and positive.

• 2.

  Most available studies have investigated the relationship between Academic Behavioral Confidence and student-related factors such as online learning, academic performance, and achievement. However, a paucity of research has paid heed to ABC and its association with students’ online learning trait anxiety during COVID-19 outbreak.

• 3.

  This research suggests that when prevalent for a long time, anxiety becomes passable, manageable, and adaptable.