ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education
This article is part of the Research TopicPsychoeducational Approaches to Mental Health for Educators and StudentsView all 22 articles
Understanding Student Engagement Through Motivation, Resilience, and Social Support: Evidence from Conflict-Affected Schools in Myanmar
Provisionally accepted
- University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, United States
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This study examines how motivation, resilience, and social support sustain student engagement in conflict-affected schools in Myanmar's Karenni region. Amid widespread disruption to formal education, it investigates the key psychological and social factors that help students remain engaged and tests resilience as a mediating process. Surveys were conducted with 1,217 high school students, complemented by ten in-depth interviews. Quantitative analyses, including descriptive statistics, correlations, regression, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), were performed using Stata 18, and qualitative data were thematically analyzed. Results show that self-determination and emotional regulation were the strongest internal predictors of engagement, while teacher and community support served as consistent external anchors. Family encouragement did not significantly predict engagement once other supports were considered, reflecting how displacement and economic hardship weakened traditional family roles. The study highlights resilience as the process linking motivation and social ties to engagement, extending established theories to crisis contexts where institutional and familial scaffolding are disrupted.
Keywords: student engagement, resilience, self-determination, teacher support, community-based education
Received: 02 Oct 2025; Accepted: 10 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 No. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lugyi No, lugyi_no@student.uml.edu
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