Faculty Sponsor: QAC201
Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Eden Mae Richman
Eden Mae Richman is a third year education studies and English double major from Durham, NC and Washington, DC. At Wesleyan she works as a tour guide, works at an after school program for children, and plays women’s rugby.
Abstract: When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, nearly every classroom across the United States suspended in-person instruction, disrupting the education of more than 57 million primary and secondary students nationwide (Donohue, & Miller, 2020). Over the subsequent 2020–2022 academic years, schools adopted a range of instructional modalities, including fully virtual platforms (e.g., Zoom-based instruction), hybrid models, and socially distanced in-person learning. During this period, districts were also responsible for providing critical learning resources such as laptops, tablets, and Wi-Fi hotspots to support remote education (Abirami, & Radhika, 2023). Research on gender differences during virtual learning suggests meaningful disparities between female and male students’ success with self-regulated online learning (SROL). These findings indicate that girls may have adapted more effectively to the independent and less structured nature of remote instruction, whereas boys may have been more vulnerable to challenges related to motivation, organization, and self-monitoring (Liu, Zhao, Hong, 2021). Data was drawn from the 2021 Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES), conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the spring of 2021 (CDC, 2022). My research shows that females students have substantially higher odds of worse mental health during the pandemic than males, independent of instruction model or school provided resources. Instruction mode and school resources had no significant impact on mental health.
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