The role of university teaching staff members in cognitive awareness and raising the level of health protection, value, and moral of students through the COVID‐19 pandemic

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Amani M. Al‐Hosan,Nawal M. AlRajeh,Boshra A. Arnout
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2332

ACADEMIC PAPER

The role of university teaching staff members in cognitive

awareness and raising the level of health protection, value, and

moral of students through the COVID-19 pandemic

Amani M. Al-Hosan

1

|Nawal M. AlRajeh

1

|Boshra A. Arnout

2,3

1

Faculty of Education, Princess Nourah bint

Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

2

Department of Psychology, Faculty of

Education, King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi

Arabia

3

Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts,

Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt

Correspondence

Boshra A. Arnout, Department of Psychology,

King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia.

Email: prof.arnout74@gmail.com; beahmad@

kku.edu.sa

Funding information

Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University

This study aimed to detect the role of teaching staff members in increasing university

students' awareness, health protection, moral, and value aspects through the e-learn-

ing, and to reveal the differences in the level of the teaching staff members about

their roles due to the path of college, academic degree, and academic experience. To

achieve these aims of the study, the descriptive method was applied. The study sam-

ple consisted of (101) teaching stuff member in health, scientific, and human speciali-

zations at Princess Nourah Bint Abdul Rahman University in Saudi Arabia. The

researchers designed a questionnaire to collect the data that reflects the perceptions

of teaching staff members about their cognitive, skill, health, and ethical roles toward

responding to the COVID-19 pandemic through distance education. The results indi-

cated that there are high levels of teaching staff members' perception of their skill,

health, and ethical responsibilities to raise students' awareness about the COVID-19

pandemic, while the level of teaching staff members' perception of their cognitive

responsibilities to raise students' awareness about the COVID-19 pandemic was

average. The findings indicated there are differences in the perception of the teach-

ing staff members of their cognitive, skill, health, and moral value responsibilities to

raise students' awareness about the COVID-19.

1|INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL

BACKGROUND

Educators and the researchers in the field of education and psychol-

ogy agree that studying the cognitive components and preventive

precautionary related to public health from epidemics such as COVID-

19 pandemic, which acquires the importance and priority of research

due to its association with the public health system. This study came

because of the scarcity of studies conducted on cognitive, health, and

ethical aspects, and the lack of specialized literature, and as a try to

face the inevitable human global fate that requires all countries in the

world to initiate projects and develop strategies to increase health,

psychological, and social awareness and combat dangerous pandemics

that threaten human life, including COVID-19, which is still harvested

thousands of lives a day. According to the statistics of the World

Health Organization in a number of developed countries until now,

the statistics of injuries exceeded three and a half million worldwide,

and the number of deaths exceeded two hundreds of thousands.

Arnout (2020) mentioned that COVID-19 is a new strain that was

discovered in 2019 and has not been previously identified in humans.

Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever,

cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. In more severe

cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syn-

drome, kidney failure, and even death (WHO, 2020a). On March

11, 2020, the Director-General of WHO declared the spate of infec-

tions caused by SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Received: 25 June 2020Revised: 24 July 2020Accepted: 25 July 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2332

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e2332.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of13

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2332