The silent struggle and resiliency: exploring academic dishonesty and statistics anxiety, pre-, peri-, and post-pandemic landscape

The dilemmas affecting the educational experience require effective coping while maintaining academic integrity. Thus, our study inquiries into the relationship among the coping behaviour of undergraduates (academic dishonesty), internal stressors (statistics anxiety) and external-environmental stressors (time-spans stressors: an unanticipated emergency, pre-, peri-(before and after vaccination) and post-COVID-19). Nine hundred twenty-three social sciences undergraduate students in Israeli academic institutions filled out the questionnaires, which included the Academic Misconduct Scale, Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale and the Academic Integrity Inventory. Findings show significant variations between statistics anxiety and academic dishonesty in the different time-spans. Additionally, results show that time-span affects the relationship between statistics anxiety and academic dishonesty diversely, with statistics anxiety reaching its highest peak in the post-COVID-19 time-span. We conclude that Statistics anxiety and avoidance behaviour may be addressed by means of smaller manageable tasks, boosting students' confidence, teaching coping strategies and reinforcing students' motivation.