- COVID-19 Disruptions:Evaluating the Early Impacts of Campus Closure on Academic Self-Efficacy and Motivation
During the Spring 2020 semester, college campuses across the US closed to most in-person activities as the COVID-19 pandemic began, forcing students to complete the remainder of their semesters online and away from campus. These changes disrupted students' opportunities to engage in the social aspects of the college experience and potentially influenced their academic sense of self. Prior research has conceptually grounded and empirically shown that the social aspects of the college experience, and particularly one's sense of campus belonging, influence academic orientations and success (Gopalan & Brady, 2020; Mayhew et al., 2016; Strayhorn, 2019; Weidman & DeAngelo, 2020). This raises important concerns about the potential early psychosocial effects of pandemic-based campus closures.
Our research team was collecting data during Spring 2020 for a follow-up survey of 2017 first-time undergraduate enrollees as part of a multiyear, longitudinal study of a sample of college students attending institutions across the US. These unique conditions created an unanticipated natural event, where the pandemic-induced campus closures approximated a random assignment of study subjects to different groups based on when participants completed the follow-up survey relative to the timing of campus closure. This provided the opportunity to explore the initial impacts of the closures on how students perceived their academic sense of self, which may foreshadow potential subsequent effects on academic success.
We focus attention on two psychosocial measures to understand the early impacts of the campus closures, both of which are conceptually tied to perceptions of the academic self (Bong & Skaalvik, 2003; Robbins et al., 2009). One measure is academic self-efficacy, which refers to the confidence a student has in their academic ability (Bandura, 1993) and is conceptually similar to what others have referred to as academic self-concept (Cole, 2007; Guo et al., 2022; Kim & Sax, 2014). The other measure is academic motivation, representing a student's willingness to work hard in response to, and their enjoyment of, academic challenge (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2002; Pascarella & Colleagues, 2007; O'Neill, 2012). Both measures have been found to be positively associated with a range of academic outcomes (e.g., Chemers et al., 2001; Mayhew et al., 2016; Robbins et al., 2009; Valentine et al., 2004). However, it remains unknown what the potential impacts of a sudden shock like the shutdown of in-person [End Page 455] campus activities may have had on a student's sense of academic self.1
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Prior evidence suggests that the mechanism by which campus closures may influence students' psychosocial development may stem, in part, from disruptions to the social context. Taking advantage of the random and exogenous events brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored the following questions:
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Q1. Did campus closures impact academic self-efficacy and motivation?
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Q2. To what extent did campus closures moderate the relationship between students' sense of campus belonging and their academic self-efficacy and motivation?
METHOD
Data for this study followed a longitudinal design, with three waves of surveys administered to a diverse population of college students who had received a one-time scholarship from a nonprofit educational and support organization. The first survey (T1) was administered in Fall 2017 to 839 first-time first-year college students. The second survey (T2) was administered in Fall 2018 (one year after entering college) to all respondents of the T1 survey. The third survey (T3) was administered from March to May 2020 to all respondents of the T1 survey. Overall, the longitudinal response rate was approximately 48%. After imputing missing data and applying non-response weights, the data analyzed represented 414 students attending one of 215 four-year institutions.
We focused our analysis on two outcomes measured through the T3 survey, with parallel pretests measured at T1 and T2. One of the outcomes was a four-item scale capturing academic self-efficacy (inter-item reliabilities [alphas] ranged from .67 to .84 across time periods). The other outcome was a four-item scale representing students' academic motivation (alphas = .74 to .78). Both outcomes were...