Asian Journal of Education and Social Studies

This cross-sectional study examined motivation-related experiences, study skills, and student engagement among 310 senior high school students aged 18 years or older enrolled in Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW) across five schools in Davao del Sur, Philippines, during the 2025–2026 academic year. Equal-allocation stratified sampling yielded 62 participants per school. Self-report questionnaires assessed seven motivation-related domains, five engagement domains, and six study-skills domains. Reported internal-consistency coefficients were 0.813, 0.870, and 0.819, respectively. All three overall scale means were 3.51 on a five-point response scale, corresponding to the prespecified High category. The overall motivation–engagement correlation was r = .480, motivation–study-skills correlation was r = .768, and study-skills–engagement correlation was r = .327 (all p < .001). A standardised path decomposition based on these reported overall correlations yielded a conditional study-skills–engagement coefficient of approximately −.102 and an indirect association of −.078. The approximate Sobel statistic (z = −1.30, p = .194) did not support a statistically detectable indirect association through study skills. Motivation-related experiences were positively associated with engagement, but the evidence did not support the proposed indirect pathway. Because the data were cross-sectional, self-reported, and derived from multidimensional questionnaire composites, the results should not be interpreted causally.