Students’ school success in challenging times: importance of central personal and social resources during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Students’ well-being, learning activities, and learning success are key student outcomes that can be affected by challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is vital to investigate the role of important personal (resilience, self-efficacy) and social resources (support from family, friends, teachers, important other) for central student outcomes (life satisfaction as a vital aspect of well-being, learning activities, and learning success) alongside perception of the COVID-19 situation. While the pandemic affected all of society, adolescents as a group who face core developmental challenges were especially vulnerable towards being negatively affected by the pandemic. Thus, analyses are based on 220 adolescent students (60.9% female, 37.7% male, 1.4% diverse) in Germany who were 16.21 years old on average (SD = 0.88) at time of data collection in May 2021. Students filled out an online questionnaire on sociodemographics and variables of interest. Path models revealed that perceiving the COVID-19 pandemic as stressful was negatively related to life satisfaction (β = -.27). Furthermore, perceiving the COVID-19 pandemic as stressful was negatively related to students’ self-efficacy (β = -.22) and positively to support from an important other (β = .32). Moreover, several resources were mainly positively related to our central student outcomes (β = .13-.41), and perception of the COVID-19 situation mediated two of those relations. Results underscore the importance of students’ self-efficacy, which was related to all student outcomes. Furthermore, the results and methodological issues can impact further research and practice.