Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2023 Jan 10:13:1103925.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1103925. eCollection 2022.

High prevalence of anxiety, depression, and stress among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from a meta-analysis

Tianyuan Xu  1 , Huang Wang  2
Affiliations
Review

High prevalence of anxiety, depression, and stress among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from a meta-analysis

Tianyuan Xu et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has influenced all aspects significantly, and an estimated 1.5 billion students across the globe have been forced to keep up with online courses at home. Many recent empirical studies reported the prevalence of mental health problems among students caused by remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a few studies aggregated these results. Therefore, to strengthen statistical power, the article aimed to examine the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and stress among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic via a meta-analysis. A total of 36 original articles have been selected from five academic databases, including Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, EBSCO, and Google Scholar, covering 78,674 participants in 19 nations, and yielding 60 effect sizes (22 for anxiety, 17 for depression, and 21 for stress) based on the random effects model via Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA) software. The results showed that the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and stress among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic was as high as 58, 50, and 71%, respectively. Besides, the moderator analysis found that (1) the prevalence of anxiety and depression among students in higher education was significantly higher than that of students in elementary education. (2) an increasing number of medical students and students in emergency remote learning context suffered from mental stress than their non-medical and traditional distance learning counterparts. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic triggers concerns related to physical health and mental disorders, especially for remote online learning students. The current situation should be brought to the forefront by educators to develop psychological interventions for relieving students' anxiety, depression, and stress during the pandemic period.

Keywords: COVID-19; anxiety; depression; mental health; meta-analysis; prevalence; remote learning students; stress.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A flow diagram of literature searching and screening.
Figure 2
Figure 2
A funnel plot assessing publication bias of the prevalence of anxiety among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Figure 3
Figure 3
A funnel plot assessing publication bias of the prevalence of depression among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Figure 4
Figure 4
A funnel plot assessing publication bias of the prevalence of stress among remote learning students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Adnan M., Anwar K. (2020). Online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic: students perspectives. J. Pedagog. Res. 1, 45–51. doi: 10.33902/jpsp.2020261309 - DOI
    1. Aknin L., Andretti B., Goldszmidt R., Helliwell J., Petherick A., De Neve J., et al. . (2022). Policy stringency and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries. Lancet Public Health 7, e417–e426. doi: 10.1016/S2468-2667(22)00060-3, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Al-Dabal B. K., Koura M. R., Rasheed P., Al-Sowielem L., Makki S. M. (2010). A comparative study of perceived stress among female medical and non-medical university students in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Sultan Qaboos Univ. Med. J. 10, 231–240. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Almeida M., Challa M., Ribeiro M., Harrison A. M., Castro M. C. (2021). Editorial perspective: the mental health impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 63, 608–612. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13535, PMID: - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. American College Health Association (2014). Reference group executive summary, Spring 2014. Available at: http://www.Acha-Ncha.org/Docs/ACHA-NCHA-II_ReferenceGroup_ExecutiveSumma...

LinkOut - more resources