Exploring Factors That Affected Student Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparison of Data-Mining Approaches

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YÜREKLİ H., YİĞİT Ö. E., Bulut O., Lu M., ÖZ E.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH, cilt.19, sa.18, 2022 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 19 Sayı: 18
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.3390/ijerph191811267
  • Dergi Adı: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Aqualine, Aquatic Science & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA), CAB Abstracts, EMBASE, Food Science & Technology Abstracts, Geobase, MEDLINE, Pollution Abstracts, Veterinary Science Database, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: student well-being, data mining, educational disruption, COVID-19, school closures
  • Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

COVID-19-related school closures caused unprecedented and prolonged disruption to daily life, education, and social and physical activities. This disruption in the life course affected the well-being of students from different age groups. This study proposed analyzing student well-being and determining the most influential factors that affected student well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. With this aim, we adopted a cross-sectional study designed to analyze the student data from the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS) collected between December 2020 and July 2021 from a large sample of grade 8 or equivalent students from eight countries (n = 20,720), including Burkina Faso, Denmark, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Russian Federation, Slovenia, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. We first estimated a well-being IRT score for each student in the REDS student database. Then, we used 10 data-mining approaches to determine the most influential factors that affected the well-being of students during the COVID-19 outbreak. Overall, 178 factors were analyzed. The results indicated that the most influential factors on student well-being were multifarious. The most influential variables on student well-being were students' worries about contracting COVID-19 at school, their learning progress during the COVID-19 disruption, their motivation to learn when school reopened, and their excitement to reunite with friends after the COVID-19 disruption.