Abstract:

This research on the impact of stress on learning achievement particularly for 46 students taking a critical reading and writing course brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown that began on 18 March 2020 in Malaysia, aims to uncover the relationship between stress and learning achievement. Numerous research has been generated on the factors that contributed to the stress from teaching and learning delivery to the lack of technological support in relation to Malaysian students in particular the state of Sabah. However, the research that dominate was related to early measures adopted by Malaysian Higher education institutions, the critical impact on teaching and learning as well as the psychological crisis the pandemic brought upon the university students (Balan Rathakrishnan et.al 2022; Noraini Azman and Doria Abdullah 2020; Nabil Hasan Al-Kumaim et.al 2021). The researchers focused more on the negative effects of stress on students’ perception of learning and preferences hypothesizing that the stress greatly jeopardizes learning hence the drop in learning achievement. This paper explores the experiences of stress while learning remotely during the pandemic and its relationship to learning achievement with a deeper investigation into its relationship with learning achievement. After attending the Comparative Literary Analysis course for 1 semester, the 46 students were given a set of questionnaires to reflect on their learning experience with a division between those who were stressed and unstressed during the course that was conducted online using pre-recorded lectures available at the university online learning management system smartv.3 and also telegram. Online learning sessions were held through google meet between the lecturer and students for ten weeks after which their scores for the tests are used as a marker for learning achievement. In order to understand how stress affected these student’s learning abilities during the pandemic a set of the 24-item questionnaire in relation to stress was distributed to all 46 students out of which students who claimed to have low-to-moderate stress levels while learning remotely during the pandemic were further asked to answer another set of 30 items derived from Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30) adapted from Simon Cassidy (2016) as it was designed to measure responses in students who had experienced traumatic experiences specifically alluding to self-motivation and their hopes for the future. To that end, first, chi-square tests were performed to find out if stress level (low-to-moderate stress level students vs. high -to-extreme stress level) has any differential effects on learning outcomes, and second, Mann- Whitney U tests were employed to assess if the mediating factor of resilience (high- resilience vs low-resilience) led to any variation in learning outcomes for each category of stress level. These findings provide insight into the factors that mitigated both stress and “unstressed” responses to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic and its relationship to learning outcomes and academic resilience for future implementation of hybrid learning in the era of post-pandemic.

Keywords:

Academic Resilience, Pandemic induced Stress, Learning outcomes.