DISTANCE LEARNING DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: ITALIAN TEACHERS’ WELL-BEING AND THE ROLE OF AGE ON ICT ADOPTION

Italy has been severely affected by the initial spread of Covid-19. To mitigate the pressure on the national health system, the government established several measures promoting social distancing. The suspension of teaching in attendance forced teachers to embrace telework, posing unprecedented challenges, such as implementing ICT in daily professional activities. Previous research underlined teachers’ widespread resistance toward ICT and high computer anxiety, which could be exacerbated by age. Moreover, teaching is associated with several negative outcomes, such as burnout, that can be boosted by a negative work-family balance, impacting teachers’ well-being. During the first lockdown, 244 Italian teachers aged 32 to 66 (m: 50.73;sd: 7.93;80.6% females) answered an online survey measuring psychosocial and ICT-related measures. We performed a full SEM analysis confirming that computer anxiety and work-family balance are positively associated with burnout and the negative impact of burnout on well-being dimensions. Also, results from univariate ANOVA showed differences in teachers’ attitudes toward ICT and computer anxiety according to age. © 2021, ASA Associazione per la Statistica Applicata. All rights reserved.

University student mentalwell-being during COVID-19 outbreak: What are the relationships between information seeking, perceived risk and personal resources related to the academic context?

In light of rising concern about the coronavirus pandemic crisis, a growing number of universities across the world have either postponed or canceled all campus and other activities. This posed new challenges for university students. Based on the classification proposed in the Mental Health Continuum model by Keyes, the aims were to estimate university students' prevalence of mental health during lookdown outbreak, and to examine the associations between mental health and, respectively, academic stress, self-efficacy, satisfaction for degree course, locus of control, COVID-19 risk perception, taking into account the level of information seeking about pandemic. Overall, 1124 Italian university students completed a self-report questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive and correlational analyses. Results showed that 22.3% of participants were flourishing, and levels of mental well-being appeared in line with normative values in young Italian adults;levels of academic stress were not significantly higher than those found in other student samples before the COVID-19 outbreak. Students with high levels of information seeking presented higher levels of well-being and risk perception. Results could be considered useful to realize training pathways, to help the university students to improve their well-being, post-pandemic. © 2020 by the authors.