Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on mental-health and academic performance in Canadian university students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions to the educational system since its onset in March 2020, leading to school closures and shifts to remote learning, inconsistent access to educational resources, as well as increased stress and mental health problems for both students and educators alike. These challenges have contributed to learning losses and declines in academic performance at the secondary school level. Data on the pandemic's impact on post-secondary learning outcomes is less consistent, with some studies reporting increases in academic performance, while others report declines. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the pandemic's impact on university students’ academic, mental and psychosocial functioning. Utilizing longitudinal data collected prior to the pandemic (from March 2019 to March 2020), and one year into the pandemic (March 2021-April 2021), we analyze changes in GPA, mental well-being, substance use, social networks, and subjective socioeconomic status. Additionally, we examined the predictors of educational attainment and substance use during the pandemic. Results show that while student’s GPA increased during the pandemic, social networks, and reported well-being decreased, while substance use increased. Substance use turned out to be the only significant predictor of academic performance during the pandemic, while all other indices of mental health- including general anxiety and depressive symptoms as well as stressors unique to the pandemic- were not significantly related to academic outcomes. Notably, changes in substance use from before and after the pandemic’s onset were significantly predicted by pre-existing mental health conditions suggesting that individuals with mental health challenges were more vulnerable to increased substance use and maladaptive coping during this period. Overall, these findings highlight the need for increased resources to support students' mental health and coping skills during crises, particularly for those with existing mental health vulnerabilities, which in turn can foster academic success and mitigate disruptions to their educational progress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".