Loneliness, student engagement, and academic achievement during emergency remote teaching during COVID-19: the role of the God locus of control

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many problems in the education sector, one of which is the increasing trend toward student loneliness owing to a lack of interpersonal connections in online learning activities. The present study explicitly aims to examine the relationship between loneliness and academic achievement for university students in Indonesia. Moreover, we propose moderating God’s locus of control (i.e., God’s control over behavior-related learning) (GLC) and learning student engagement, playing mediating roles in these relationships. The data were collected from 324 respondents among university students in Indonesia during emergency remote teaching. The moderated-mediated regression analysis using Hayes’ PROCESS macro found loneliness negatively related to engagement and academic achievement. Student engagement had a positive relationship with academic achievement and served as a mediator between loneliness and academic achievement. Furthermore, GLC was found to moderate the relationship between loneliness and learning engagement as well as loneliness and academic achievement. This study’s findings uncover GLC’s role as a boundary condition, and confirms that learning-engagement intermediates the relationship between loneliness and academic achievement. Students with high perceived God control tend to anticipate the impact of loneliness on learning behavior amid isolation and loneliness because of the pandemic.