ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT AND SELF-REGULATED LEARNING AS PREDICTORS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL PUPILS’ ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN ENGLISH STUDIES IN EBONYI STATE

Abstract

For primary school education, promoting both academic engagement and self-regulated learning is crucial. Teachers should design interactive lessons, encourage goal setting, provide feedback, and teach simple self-monitoring strategies. The study determined academic engagement and self-regulated learning as predictors of primary school pupils’ academic achievement in English Studies in Ebonyi State. Five purposes, five research questions guided the study and five hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a correlational research design. The population of the study consisted of all 12,410 Primary school Five (Pri. 5) pupils of the 1,088 government owned (public) primary schools Ebonyi State who enrolled for 2025/2026 academic session with a sample of 400 primary five (127 male and 273 female) pupils which was determined using multi-stage sampling procedure. Data was collected using the Pupils’ Academic Engagement Questionnaire (PAEQ), Pupils’ Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire (PSRLQ) and pupils’ academic achievement scores from their promotion examination results in English Studies in Primary 4 for 2024/2025 academic session. The instruments were validated by three experts. Using Crombach Alpha method, the reliability coefficients of the instruments were estimated to be 0.82 and 0.86 with overall reliability of 0.84. The researcher together with six research assistant collected data for the study. Ordinary Least Square simple was used to answer the research questions while multiple regression was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings among others revealed that there is a positive prediction between academic engagement and pupils’ academic achievement in English Studies in Ebonyi State. Also, there was a positive significant prediction between academic self-regulated learning and pupils’ academic achievement in English Studies in Ebonyi State. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that, English Studies teachers should adopt learner-centred instructional strategies that promote pupils’ active participation in classroom activities. Again, school administrators and head teachers should organize regular in-service training, workshops, and seminars for primary school teachers on strategies for fostering academic engagement and self-regulated learning among pupils.