How the COVID-19 Pandemic Revealed the Need to Address Student Mental Health—and How Cognitive Skills Help
By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and amplified mental health challenges for children and adolescents, making clear that schools, families, and communities must do more to support young people’s emotional wellbeing. Extended school closures, social distancing, remote learning, and prolonged isolation have taken a measurable toll on students’ mental health—affecting anxiety, depression, behavior, and the ability to learn effectively.
Even after many students returned to in-person classrooms, the emotional consequences persisted. Teachers and school staff report increased anxiety, grief, depression, disruptive behavior, bullying, and other signs that children continue to struggle. Professional organizations serving pediatric and adolescent mental health have described the situation as a national emergency, underscoring the urgency of comprehensive responses that address both emotional health and learning capacity.
Cognition and Mental Health
Understanding the relationship between learning and mental health is critical. While connecting students to mental health treatment and supports is a necessary first step, another often-overlooked factor is cognitive skills—the mental processes that enable perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and problem-solving. Cognitive impairment commonly accompanies mood and anxiety disorders, and research shows a direct link between cognition and mental health.
Cognition includes the processing skills that allow children to take in, organize, store, and apply information. When a child experiences anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, those conditions can impair cognitive function and, in turn, reduce the child’s ability to learn. Conversely, strengthening cognitive skills can reduce stress by improving a student’s confidence in their ability to learn, tackle problems, and engage successfully with new material.
Educators and parents often focus on curriculum and instruction, but many learning struggles stem from uneven cognitive strengths and weaknesses rather than from poor teaching alone. Visual processing, auditory processing, attention, working memory, and reasoning are examples of skills that underlie academic performance. Students with underdeveloped cognitive processes may not fully access lessons whether learning in person or online, because they are missing the foundational tools needed to process information reliably.
That unpredictability—sometimes a task feels easy, other times impossible—can be a major source of stress. Students who do not know their own cognitive strengths and weaknesses cannot predict which learning experiences will succeed. In contrast, when students and their teachers understand cognitive variability, learning becomes more predictable and manageable. Students can learn strategies that leverage their strengths, while teachers and parents can assign appropriate responsibilities and supports.
The Promise of Cognitive Training
Comprehensive, integrated cognitive training targets the core processes the brain uses to learn. Systematic practice can make those processes stronger and more efficient, improving a student’s capacity to attend, remember, reason, and solve problems. While cognitive training is not a substitute for clinical mental health care when a child has a diagnosable disorder, it can be a powerful complementary approach that reduces stress by increasing competence and confidence.
Research involving students with specific learning disabilities demonstrates measurable benefits from focused cognitive training. In controlled studies, students who received regular cognitive training in addition to standard educational interventions showed significant cognitive gains and improved academic outcomes compared with peers who received only standard interventions. Those gains translated into measurable increases in reading and math performance over relatively short time frames.
Improving cognitive functioning is possible across a range of circumstances—whether the root cause is a chronic condition, short-term stress, or a developmental lag. Strengthening cognitive skills helps children build resilience, emotional regulation, and the self-efficacy that supports both learning and general wellbeing.
Student Wellbeing and Brain Fitness
Brain fitness interventions—targeted practices that build higher-order processing skills, attention, and self-regulation—can promote emotional resilience and mitigate the effects of stress on learning. Implemented broadly and equitably across educational settings, these interventions can fortify academic performance while also improving emotional mastery.
Importantly, brain fitness supports students across socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds. When integrated into school systems alongside mental health supports and quality instruction, cognitive training and brain fitness approaches can help close achievement gaps and improve outcomes for children now and in the future.
Stakeholders at every level—educators, administrators, clinicians, and families—have a role to play in recognizing and promoting brain health as a foundational component of a strong education system.
Want to Learn More?
Resources and professional development can help schools and families implement strategies that increase learning while reducing stress. Upcoming workshops and webinars from practitioners in cognitive training and school mental health can explain how targeted interventions identify root causes of learning gaps, reveal common causes of anxiety in the learning process, and build students’ cognitive skills to improve self-confidence and reduce stress.
- Identifying the root causes of learning gaps
- Understanding the impact of anxiety and stress on learning
- Recognizing common triggers of learning-related anxiety
- Exploring the relationship between learning capacity and anxiety
- Building cognitive skills to boost confidence and reduce stress
About the Authors
Betsy Hill is president of BrainWare Learning Company, an organization focused on developing learning capacity through applied neuroscience. An experienced educator, she has studied the neuroscience of learning and taught strategic thinking in graduate programs. Her work centers on practical applications that help children and adults strengthen cognitive skills to support academic and personal success.
Roger Stark is co-founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. He has led efforts to bring comprehensive cognitive literacy training and assessment within reach of many learners. His work includes developing accessible, research-based cognitive training tools designed to improve the core processes that underlie learning.
Originally published by The Learning Counsel, this article highlights the intersection of mental health, cognitive development, and education—urging a more integrated approach to support students’ learning and wellbeing in a post-pandemic world.