Development of a PLS-SEM-ANN hybrid model for predicting college students’ academic achievement from physical exercise through social support and psychological resilience

As national strategies for education reform deepen, exploring the association between physical exercise and college students’ academic achievement has become a critical priority in higher education. Although existing literature has confirmed a positive association between physical exercise and academic achievement, scant attention has been paid to systematically elucidating the underlying mechanism by integrating social support and psychological resilience within a serial mediation framework (chain mediation model). Drawing upon Social Support Theory (SST), Conservation of Resources Theory (COR), and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study constructs a theoretical model to unravel how physical exercise is associated with academic achievement via the serial indirect pathways of social support and psychological resilience, while also examining the moderating effect of time management ability. A total of 950 valid responses were collected, and a two-stage hybrid approach combining Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was employed for empirical validation. The PLS-SEM results indicate that physical exercise shows a significant direct positive association with academic achievement (β = 0.156, $$\:p<0.001$$ ) and an indirect effect was identified via the serial mediation path of “Physical Exercise → Social Support → Psychological Resilience → Academic Achievement” ( \:β\:=0.008 , $$\:p=0.006$$ ). The ANN sensitivity analysis aligns highly with the PLS-SEM findings, further corroborating that psychological resilience is the strongest associate of academic achievement in terms of normalized importance (normalized importance = 64.580%), followed by physical exercise (44.950%) and social support (25.550%), thereby verifying the robustness of the conclusions. This study elucidates the underlying mechanisms by which physical exercise is positively associated with academic achievement via the indirect pathways of social support and psychological resilience, as well as the boundary condition of time management ability. These findings provide a theoretical basis and practical guidance for higher education administrators to formulate differentiated and precise student development strategies.