Psychological well-being and postgraduate students' academic achievement in research methodology at an ODL institution

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which psychological well-being variables (sense of coherence, research self-efficacy, locus of control and hope) could predict the academic achievement of students enrolled for a research methodology module at a postgraduate level in an open and distance learning (ODL) context, while controlling for the effect of biographical variables (gender, age, culture group, home language and employment status). An availability sample (N = 840) of postgraduate students enrolled for a course in research methodology across three years was used. Stepwise linear regression showed that gender, culture group and language predicted 17.6 per cent of the variance in academic achievement in this module. When the psychological well-being variables were added, only research self-efficacy emerged as a statistically significant predictor, adding 1.5 per cent of the variance explained in academic achievement in this research methodology module.