**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly unprecedently affected all spheres of life including school life. The educational institutions' closure and the necessary gradual move to the online means of instructing inevitably impacted scholastic achievement. Many of these institutions all around the world still grapple with how and when to make informed decisions about when to return to in-person courses.

Studies on how and how much COVID-19 impacted students learning would serve as a backdrop against which balanced decisions about jeopardies associated with the teaching staff and students would be taken.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a state of health emergency and the kingdom has taken drastic measures to prevent its expansion. The Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education, and Scientific Research took decisions to maintain the continuity of school life all along the educational year and decided to stop in-present education in all sectors including higher education levels. Courageous preventive measures were immediately taken and other decisions to adopt online courses and move to distance learning and teaching were also made. Many questions were raised related to teachers' readiness, ability, and aptitude to use information and communication technologies (ICTs), students' availability and ability to be online every time situations call for it, and the abrupt impact that technology could produce while moving from face-to-face to face-to-monitor.

Amidst all this unclarity and uncertainty about how much COVID-19 impacted scholastic achievement, there is growing consensus that this novel virus lockdown closures had negative effects on students' learning. However, the elucidation of this situation comes from the fact that after a year there is ample data in hand to go beyond prophetic measures and begin the testing of this data. Schools have endured the effects and are now after a year can measure the post-COVID-19 pandemic consequences.

For more than 15 years, the Ministry of National Education has introduced the teaching of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the benefit of university students (ICT module for students of semester 5). A large number of teachers in the school have benefited from continuing training provided within the framework of the strategy of the GENIE program (Generalization of information and communication technologies in education in Morocco) and by the Moroccan-Korean Training Center [1].

For the first time in 2005, the Moroccan government adopted a new ICTs program under the appellation, GENIE, as one way of operationally implementing the national strategy of digitizing the public education sector and enabling students in primary, secondary, and tertiary levels to benefit from four components: infrastructure, teacher training, digital resources, and development of uses. This ICTs' generalization strategy, launched in 2006 and revised in 2009, has set a basis for the equipment of schools with Internet-connected ends with rich digital resources. Encouragement of creation and innovation of these resources as well as support to users was enhanced beside training modules for all stakeholders to guarantee good use and usage. By and large, the main objectives set by the GENIE strategy in 2006 were to convince teachers to accept and to stop resist and to actively involve them in to integrate ICT in their teaching and to contribute to the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning through the use of ICT. However, it is noteworthy to mention here that many teachers did not participate as the training was optional and many of them choose to resist and not to drop in and only some, the motivated, expressed their interest. Some of these were motivated by the awards the ministry granted [1].

The primary focus of this study is to determine whether the students of the faculty of Languages, Lettres, and Arts, Ibn Tofail University suffer psychologically under the influence of the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from hundreds of students, 297 participants, these research questions are set forth for the present study:

<sup>1.</sup>Is students' perceived scholastic achievement affected by COVID-19 pandemic conditions?

*From Face-to-Face to Face-to-Screen: A Correlational Analysis of Psychological Impacts… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102547*


The hypotheses emanating from the above research questions are:


#### **2. Review of the literature**

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedentedly considerable repercussions on human life in every aspect and the education sector is no exception to this devastating contagion. Against this backdrop, governments were quick in responding to this devastating contamination as educational institutions halted every aspect of contact and were forced to shift to online classes. This novel virus that was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, has spread speedily ravaging peoples' lives and turning them upside down, school life was no exception. The outbreak of this pandemic pushed several if not all scientists to try their best to study its ramifications and effects at various levels, particularly at the educational level.

In this regard, in the educational context, the devastating impacts were also felt [2]. Several concurring factors have converged to make the COVID-19 pandemic a worldwide catastrophe without precedent on school life and hence produced great psychological sufferings [3]. Therefore, there are different types of the risk factors related to COVID-19 psychological perceived impact. Prabhakar, Kapoor, and Mahajan [4]. Stress the fact that the crisis created by the pandemic is cruel to school children as it can lead to stress, mental illnesses, and various psychological problems such as lack of coping skills and even enhanced self-harm behaviors. In the same vein, Handayani & Sri Sumartiningsih [5] claim that like any other pandemic, COVID-19 had diverse effects on different groups with different degrees of impact. University students are a vulnerable group that suffered directly from stress, depression, and anxiety effects due to disruption or cancelation of usual life events like final in-present final exams and/or graduation ceremonies.

Empirically and in a study on stressors, coping strategies, and mental health impacts of COVID-19 in international students studying abroad led by [6], the team discovered that more than 80% of the students had moderate-to-high perceived stress. Exhaustively, in the sample studied, they found that stress related to academics, health, and lack of social support were predictive of higher perceived stress levels and more severe anxiety and depression symptoms. In another study conducted by [7, 8], these scholars have found that the risk impact factors differ according to social groups to which students pertain. Those emanating from financially disadvantaged backgrounds and in developing countries found themselves forced to quit school and give a hand to their breadwinners who already lost their jobs. They also found themselves disadvantaged insofar as the availability of online teaching and learning means and hence cause

unwillingness and feeling of bitterness not to pursue their studies online like others where internet connectivity is better.

Extra variables that impacted students' academic achievement, as well as life, can be explained through the learning theories that marked the history of humans as to their learning and environment with particular focus on the bioecological systems theory. The behaviorists with their revolutionizing of our understanding by advancing the principle of operant conditioning trial and error and reinforcement or punishment. Later came the social learning theory by Albert Bandura who elaborated on the behaviorist theory but considered humans as thinking beings who anticipate, punish themselves, and are capable of storing information for later use. The cognitive-developmental theory of the Swiss Linguist Jean Piaget followed strongly later. The theory emphasized the importance of 'constructing' an advanced mode of thinking through a mechanism of combining maturation and experience. Other views of cognitive development along with that of Piaget's were very influential too, the reference here is to Vygotsky's sociocultural and the informative-processing perspectives. The theory adopted here insofar as the academic achievement of our respondents is the Bioecological systems theory by [9].

This persuasive model lays the ground for another deeper understanding of human development in relation to the changing environment and its effects on academic achievement. The system theories postulate that this development is impacted by an interplay between the changing context and the changing environment where one affects the other and where they are joined at the hip units [10]. The complex mutual impacts are seen as a co-acting process between the two parties which are entangled in a dynamic system. According to Bronfenbrenner's perspective, there exist five systems that interact with the individual and many bidirectional or reciprocal impacts are at play as is shown in **Figure 1**.

The first system is the microsystem which is described as the "immediate setting containing that person" [6, p. 514], that is, the direct context in which the person gets in first touch with other people like family, neighbors, and peers. It is the proximal level of context to the individual. The mesosystem is the second layer of the model and is referred to as 'a system of microsystems' through which youth's life is influenced by one or more environments without direct contact with the youth [11]. The macrosystem comprises broad social environments or social beliefs and values that impact the youth incorporating features such as political, religious, and educational values as well as appropriate standards of behavior. The exosystem is described as the system that involves social settings where the individuals

#### **Figure 1.**

*Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of individual development. (Adopted from Sigelman & Rider [10], p. 114).*

*From Face-to-Face to Face-to-Screen: A Correlational Analysis of Psychological Impacts… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102547*

do not interact with but can still influence their development [10]. It shows how distal this system is from the individual, however, decisions taken significantly affect him/her. In addition to the nested series of systems, the chronosystem is the last added system to the model and stipulates that the interplay between the environment and the individual change over time and have different ramifications and schemes [12].

The evolutionary, psychoanalytic, learning, cognitive-developmental, and bioecological systems perspectives capture the complexity of human life with its interplay with the environment be it immediate or distant. However, the bioecological systems theory is more probing as to its complete depiction of the whole human development especially when it comes to academic achievement.
