Teachers’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

With an emergence of research investigating the educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, empirical studies assessing teachers’ mental health throughout the pandemic have been scarce. Using a large national data set, the current study compares mental health outcomes during the pandemic between pre-K–12 teachers and professionals in other occupations. Further, we compare the prevalence of mental health outcomes between in-person and remote teachers (N = 134,693). Findings indicate that teachers reported a greater prevalence of anxiety symptoms than did those in other professions and that remote teachers reported significantly higher levels of distress than did those teaching in person. We summarize the policy implications of these results.

Keywords

health policy policy analysis survey research teacher research

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

American Psychological Association. (2022). APA dictionary of psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/mental-health

Borenstein

Hedges

L. V.

Higgins

J. P. T.

Rothstein

H. R.

(2009). Introduction to meta- analysis. John Wiley and Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470743386

Delphi Group. (2021). COVID symptom survey. https://cmu-delphi.github.io/delphi-epidata/symptom-survey/

Dong

Gardner

(2020). An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. The Lancet, Infectious Diseases, 20(5), 533–534. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473–3099(20)30120–1

Kamenetz

(2020, December 4). 5 things we’ve learned about virtual school in 2020. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/04/938050723/5-things-weve-learned-about-virtual-school-in-2020

Lumley

(2020). Survey: Analysis of complex survey samples. R package version 4.0.

Rossi

P. H.

Lipsey

M. W.

Freeman

H. E.

(2018). Evaluation: A systematic approach (7th ed.). Sage Publications.

Salomon

J. A.

Reinhart

Bilinski

Chua

E. J.

La Motte-Kerr

Rönn

M. M.

Reitsma

Morris

K. A.

LaRocca

Farag

Kreuter

Rosenfeld

Tibshirani

R. J.

(2021). The U.S. COVID-19 trends and impact survey, 2020–2021: Continuous real-time measurement of COVID-19 symptoms, risks, protective behaviors, testing and vaccination. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.24.21261076

Singer

(2020, December 3). Teaching in the pandemic: “This is not sustainable.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/us/teachers-remote-learning-burnout.html

10.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Guidance for COVID-19 prevention in K–12 schools. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/k-12-guidance.html

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.16 MB