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Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous loss starting from early this year. This article aims to investigate the change of anxiety severity and prevalence among non-graduating undergraduate students in the new semester of online learning during COVID-19 in China and also to evaluate a machine le...

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Autores principales: Wang, Chongying, Zhao, Hong, Zhang, Haoran
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33343461
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.587413
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author Wang, Chongying
Zhao, Hong
Zhang, Haoran
author_facet Wang, Chongying
Zhao, Hong
Zhang, Haoran
author_sort Wang, Chongying
collection PubMed
description The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous loss starting from early this year. This article aims to investigate the change of anxiety severity and prevalence among non-graduating undergraduate students in the new semester of online learning during COVID-19 in China and also to evaluate a machine learning model based on the XGBoost model. A total of 1172 non-graduating undergraduate students aged between 18 and 22 from 34 provincial-level administrative units and 260 cities in China were enrolled onto this study and asked to fill in a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) twice, respectively, during February 15 to 17, 2020, before the new semester started, and March 15 to 17, 2020, 1 month after the new semester based on online learning had started. SPSS 22.0 was used to conduct t-test and single factor analysis. XGBoost models were implemented to predict the anxiety level of students 1 month after the start of the new semester. There were 184 (15.7%, Mean = 58.45, SD = 7.81) and 221 (18.86%, Mean = 57.68, SD = 7.58) students who met the cut-off of 50 and were screened as positive for anxiety, respectively, in the two investigations. The mean SAS scores in the second test was significantly higher than those in the first test (P < 0.05). Significant differences were also found among all males, females, and students majoring in arts and sciences between the two studies (P < 0.05). The results also showed students from Hubei province, where most cases of COVID-19 were confirmed, had a higher percentage of participants meeting the cut-off of being anxious. This article applied machine learning to establish XGBoost models to successfully predict the anxiety level and changes of anxiety levels 4 weeks later based on the SAS scores of the students in the first test. It was concluded that, during COVID-19, Chinese non-graduating undergraduate students showed higher anxiety in the new semester based on online learning than before the new semester started. More students from Hubei province had a different level of anxiety than other provinces. Families, universities, and society as a whole should pay attention to the psychological health of non-graduating undergraduate students and take measures accordingly. It also confirmed that the XGBoost model had better prediction accuracy compared to the traditional multiple stepwise regression model on the anxiety status of university students.
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spelling pubmed-77445902020-12-18 Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach Wang, Chongying Zhao, Hong Zhang, Haoran Front Psychol Psychology The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous loss starting from early this year. This article aims to investigate the change of anxiety severity and prevalence among non-graduating undergraduate students in the new semester of online learning during COVID-19 in China and also to evaluate a machine learning model based on the XGBoost model. A total of 1172 non-graduating undergraduate students aged between 18 and 22 from 34 provincial-level administrative units and 260 cities in China were enrolled onto this study and asked to fill in a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) twice, respectively, during February 15 to 17, 2020, before the new semester started, and March 15 to 17, 2020, 1 month after the new semester based on online learning had started. SPSS 22.0 was used to conduct t-test and single factor analysis. XGBoost models were implemented to predict the anxiety level of students 1 month after the start of the new semester. There were 184 (15.7%, Mean = 58.45, SD = 7.81) and 221 (18.86%, Mean = 57.68, SD = 7.58) students who met the cut-off of 50 and were screened as positive for anxiety, respectively, in the two investigations. The mean SAS scores in the second test was significantly higher than those in the first test (P < 0.05). Significant differences were also found among all males, females, and students majoring in arts and sciences between the two studies (P < 0.05). The results also showed students from Hubei province, where most cases of COVID-19 were confirmed, had a higher percentage of participants meeting the cut-off of being anxious. This article applied machine learning to establish XGBoost models to successfully predict the anxiety level and changes of anxiety levels 4 weeks later based on the SAS scores of the students in the first test. It was concluded that, during COVID-19, Chinese non-graduating undergraduate students showed higher anxiety in the new semester based on online learning than before the new semester started. More students from Hubei province had a different level of anxiety than other provinces. Families, universities, and society as a whole should pay attention to the psychological health of non-graduating undergraduate students and take measures accordingly. It also confirmed that the XGBoost model had better prediction accuracy compared to the traditional multiple stepwise regression model on the anxiety status of university students. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-12-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7744590/ /pubmed/33343461 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.587413 Text en Copyright © 2020 Wang, Zhao and Zhang. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Wang, Chongying
Zhao, Hong
Zhang, Haoran
Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title_full Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title_fullStr Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title_full_unstemmed Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title_short Chinese College Students Have Higher Anxiety in New Semester of Online Learning During COVID-19: A Machine Learning Approach
title_sort chinese college students have higher anxiety in new semester of online learning during covid-19: a machine learning approach
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33343461
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.587413
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