Student stress and worry related to distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused considerable stress and anxiety in the general population, especially among students. The objective of this study was to determine the stress and anxiety levels among medical rehabilitation students induced by distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methodology: The sample for this prospective cross-sectional study included 96 students pursuing the medical rehabilitation undergraduate degree at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. All respondents took part in an online survey created on the Google Forms platform and accessed via the Facebook social network. The questionnaire included a sociodemographic section, the perceived stress scale (PSS), and the worry about online learning scale (WOLS). All data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS version 25. Results: The study involved 96 students with an average age of 21.97 +/- 1.55 years, 72.9% of whom were female. The total stress reported by the students during the COVID-19 pandemic was higher in females than in males (21.75 [SD = 7.50] vs. 17.84 [SD = 8.58]; p < 0.05). Younger students were more susceptible to experiencing stress during the pandemic (rho =-0.217, p < 0.05). Moreover, 57.3% of students suffered from moderate stress, while the WOLS scores indicated that distance education induced a high level of discomfort in this cohort (3.8 [IQR = 1.6]).Conclusions: Medical rehabilitation students showed a moderate level of stress and a high level of concern about distance education. This stress was more prevalent among younger students and females.