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

Hülya Yürekli (), Öyküm Esra Yiğit, Okan Bulut, Min Lu and Ersoy Öz
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Hülya Yürekli: Department of Statistics, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul 34220, Türkiye
Öyküm Esra Yiğit: Department of Statistics, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul 34220, Türkiye
Okan Bulut: Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G5, Canada
Min Lu: Department of Public Health Sciences, Miler School of Medicine, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33136, USA
Ersoy Öz: Department of Statistics, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul 34220, Türkiye

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 18, 1-16

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: student well-being; data mining; educational disruption; COVID-19; school closures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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