the causal modeling of academic self-efficacy, self-regulation, and academic engagement among tefl undergraduate students: a pls-sem analysis

In recent years, academic engagement has become known as an academic quality indicator and is therefore considered one of the goals of higher education. the purpose of this study was to shed light on the relationships among srl components, critical thinking skills, and the academic achievement of iranian efl learners through partial least squares structural equation modeling (pls-sem). to this end, 210 undergraduate university students majoring in tefl completed the academic self-efficacy scale (nielsen et al., 2018), academic self-regulated learning scale (a-srl-s) (magno (2009), and academic engagement (hart, stewart, and jimerson, 2011). the sem results revealed that among self-regulation sub-components, cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies predicted self-dedication, empowerment, and assimilation in academic engagement. examining the association between dimensions of student engagement and self-regulated language learning, we can conclude that emotional engagement had no significant relationship with self-regulated language learning, while behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement, and agentic engagement had statistically significant relationships with self-regulated language learning, with the behavioral engagement having the highest coefficient. the study offers pedagogical implications concerning the kind of relationships among the variables to improve the quality of learning.