Chapter 9: The Entangled: Post-COVID-19 Cognitive, Psychological and Motivational States

The COVID-19 pandemic has hindered the provision of educational services for a considerably long time. Even today, students, teachers, educators, and other stakeholders continue to struggle with the permanent traces of the pandemic. The present research intends to delve into the opinions of students and teachers at the high school and at the tertiary level while investigating some key variables. A combination (variation) design, one of the mixed research methods, was deployed in this regard. Utilizing random sampling, 428 high school students, 189 teachers of different branches, 673 university students and 105 faculty members were employed in the research. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Screener (GAD-7), Motivation Scale (MS) and Semi-Structured Interview Questions were utilized as the data collection instruments. The data obtained within the scope of the research were analyzed using SPSS 25, AMOS 24, and The PROCESS macro for the SPSS (Hayes, 2018) program. In addition to the models developed by Hayes (2018), path analyses produced by the researchers of the current study were also referred to. At the end, it was determined that the cognitive test results of high school students were low, and their motivation results were affected by the variables of depression and anxiety. These variations appear to be creating significant differences in variables such as gender, receiving psychological support, providing mentor support, adaptation to the post-pandemic process, digital competence and infrastructure competence.