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Abstract
Student engagement is seen as one of the important constructs that is used to understand the behaviour of the student towards the teaching-learning process. Understanding the behaviour of students in the academic institutions will provide a glimpse of how the instructions and academic practices are going on in the university. Therefore, this study assessed academic stress, emotional intelligence and resilience as predictors of undergraduates' academic engagement.
The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and used a multi-stage sampling technique to select the 421 participants of this study. Four validated questionnaires were used for data collection, which was pilot tested through test-re-test. Three hypotheses were formulated and tested. Analysis of data was done using descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis
fixed at the 0.05 level of significance.
The findings revealed that the most potent predictor of undergraduates' academic engagement is emotional intelligence (β = .412; t = 5.171; p = .000 < .05) followed by resilience (β = .288; t = 3.923; p = .000 <.05), and lastly by academic stress (β = .288; t = -2.666; p = .000 <.05). There was a significant prediction of male (R = .334; R2 = .111; Adj R2 = .111; F (4,147) = 7.712; p = .000 <.05) and female (R = .454; R2 = .206; R2 (adj.) = .206; F (4,243) = 10.534; p .000 <.05) undergraduates' academic engagement. Also, the predictors variable accounted for 25% of the variance observed in the undergraduates' academic engagement in private universities and 15% in the public universities.
It is therefore concluded that since academic engagement is important in the overall performance of students in their chosen course of study, it is suggested that academic burnout should be carefully and thoroughly checkmated for students to fully benefit from school outcomes.
Keywords: Academic engagement, undergraduates, academic stress, emotional intelligence, resilience,