Emerging Adults’ Quest for Autonomy; Self-Regulation and Its Impacts on Students’ Academic Productivity in State Universities in Cameroon
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This study examined emerging adults’ quest for autonomy; self-regulation as a factor on students’ academic productivity in State Universities in Cameroon. A mixed research method and the explanatory design were used. The sample was made up of 624-year 2 master students of 8 faculties. In selecting respondents and study sites or faculties for the study, a multi-stage sampling technique (purposive, simple random and stratified sampling technique) was used. The instruments used for data collection were a closed ended questionnaire and an interview guide for students. The content validity index was 0.96 and the overall reliability of the instrument was 0.955. Data was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively and descriptive (frequency counts, percentages) and inferential statistics (Chi-Square) were used to analyze quantitative data while qualitative data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Spearman rho test was used to establish the relationship between self-regulation and academic productivity of university students. The findings indicated that, majority of the emerging adults 95.1% with an overall mean of 3.56 on a scale of 1-4 have strong self-regulation while 4.9% do not. Furthermore, asking some of the emerging adults how self-control in relation to self-regulation impacted their academic productivity, many of them said self-control/regulation helps enhance their focus to studies, help guided their decisions, enable them to set priority, guided their actions, help them to make relevant choices, makes them becoming more conscious and study effectively. And, statistically, at df of 619, and confidence interval of 95, the r-critical value is 0.079 which is less than the calculated r-value of 0.136. By this, it implies that self-regulation significantly influences academic productivity of emerging adults (R- value = 0.136**, p-value 0.001 < 0.05). Therefore, the hypothesis that states self-regulation has a significant influence on academic productivity of emerging adults was accepted. This encourages the active implementation of the student-centered approach to learning in which case the students’ needs and interests are catered for, causing them to develop a sense of belonging, ownership and autonomy in their educational activities. Based on the findings, some recommendations were made to the effect that; students should develop resilience and targeted initiatives to support their career. High impact practices can support factors like socializing, connection with career choice, and closer collaboration with instructors or mentors. Also, students should be optimistic and develop realistic, meaningful, challenging and achievable goals that will help them develop a sense of direction and purpose. Such students perform well academically because they would be self-motivated learn.
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