Students' Sense of Relatedness During and After the Pandemic and Its Relationship With Academic Motivation

• In Event: The Dynamic Interplay Between Context, Socializers, and Student Motivation

Abstract

COVID-19 emerged primarily as a threat to human’s physical health, but it was not long before we realized its detrimental effects on our psychological well-being, especially due to the lockdowns. A comparison of 197 Iranian female high school students’ sense of relatedness with their significant others before and during the pandemic revealed that the students felt closer to their mothers and more detached from their classmates during the pandemic. Relatedness with teachers remained relatively stable, ranking last among the other types of relatedness both before and during the pandemic. This alarming finding calls for heavier investment in strengthening student-teacher bonds, as the results of the study indicated that relatedness with teachers serves as the most powerful predictor of academic motivation.

Authors

• Kimiya Vaezi, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim, University of Alberta
  Non-Presenting Author