The relationship between students’ psychological security level, academic engagement and performance variables in the digital educational environment

In connection with the situation with COVID-19 almost all universities in the world were transferred to e-learning format, therefore new factors started to influence academic engagement and performance. Psychological security is one of these factors. Many researches have studied the importance of psychological security level among students, some of them proposed the methodology of assessing the indicator. Nevertheless, there are few studies that demonstrate the relationship between psychological security level of students and their academic engagement and performance. The aim of the current study is to close this scientific gap. For the assessment the Trustworthiness Factors survey, Academic Engagement Scale and academic performance results were used. A total of 351 students aged between 19 and 21 (M = 19.57, SD = 0.59), mainly female (57%), were integrated in the sample. Online surveys were conducted to reveal the level of students’ psychological security, their academic engagement and performance in the process of e-learning and analyze the associations between these variables. The female students analyzed showed higher levels of psychological security, and especially in the communication of own ideas in webinar rooms. The same tendency was found in the levels of academic engagement and performance. The findings obtained by using the linear regression analysis technique indicated that psychological security predicted academic performance positively. In contrast to earlier studies, student safety is considered not only as an aspect of personal data security, but more as a psychological one. It was possible to conclude that the influence of psychological security on students’ engagement and academic performance is particularly visible in the online educational environment.