Olutayo Toyin OMOLE, Babatunde Kasim OLADELE, Adeyemi John OKEDIRAN

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ ENGAGEMENT AND CAREER CHOICE AS PREDICTIVE VALIDITY OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT


The quality of students admitted into Nigerian universities and graduates from these universities has declined significantly, and the academic performance of Nigerian students in higher education is substantially below the expected levels. There may be a connection between this phenomenon and the country's falling educational standards. This study's main goal was to determine the predictive validity of undergraduate student engagement, career aspiration, and academic achievement within the Faculty of Education at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The research design employed in this study was the descriptive survey design. A purposeful sampling technique was used to select all 10 departments in the University of Ibadan's Faculty of Education that offered CEF 102, and 287 second-year undergraduates were sampled. Undergraduate students' academic engagement (r = 0.83) and career goals (r = 0.82) were the instruments used to collect the data. The scores of the second-year undergraduate students in CEF 102 were obtained. Data were analysed using Multiple Regressionanalysis which demonstrated that students' career choice and engagement significantly predicted academic performance. Both variables had a meaningful impact on academic performance, although student engagement negatively predicted achievement when career choice was held constant, reducing achievement by approximately 0.15. The regression model accounted for 2.1% of the variance in academic performance, and the combined influence of career choice and academic engagement on academic performance was statistically significant. Keywords: Undergraduate Students, Achievement in CEF 102, Career Choice, Student engagement-

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