Abstract
Inter- and intraindividual differences in Finnish adolescents’ developmental trajectories of school engagement and burnout (exhaustion, inadequacy, and cynicism) and their associations with students’ concurrent progression in mathematics performance and educational aspirations were investigated in an accelerated longitudinal study design spanning ages 13–17 (N = 1131, 50.9% girls). Growth mixture modeling analyses identified four distinct trajectory profiles: Positive academic well-being (high and stable engagement, low and stable burnout), Negative academic well-being (low U-shaped engagement, increased burnout), Disengaged (low U-shaped engagement, but also low and stable burnout), and Declining academic well-being (declining but U-shaped engagement, increasing burnout). Most students experienced a positive change in their trajectories after entering upper secondary education. Furthermore, students in the Positive academic well-being group performed better and progressed faster in mathematics and reported higher educational aspirations. Students in the Declining academic well-being group started out with high performance and aspirations, but they progressed at a slower rate in mathematics and lowered their aspirations over time. The Disengaged students’ performance progressed at the slowest rate of all groups, and they had one of the lowest educational aspirations overall. Lastly, students in the Negative academic well-being group performed the lowest in mathematics, and had one of the lowest aspirations for future educational degrees.
Highlights
Adolescence is a phase characterized by many individual and envi ronmental changes and challenges, and the majority of stu dents manage adolescence without any severe problems, some seem to experience rather negative shifts in their academic well-being during this time (Roeser et al, 1999)
As there seem to be some differences in students’ academic well-being with respect to individual characteristics, and considering that school engagement and burnout have been found to be differentially associated with several educational outcomes, we investigated whether students’ individual trajectories of school engagement and burnout would be differently associated with gender, socio-economic status (SES), performance in mathematics, and domain-general educational aspirations
Regarding educational outcomes, we found that the trajectory profiles were associated with both mathematics perfor mance and educational aspirations in meaningful ways, so that students with overall positive and stable trajectories of school engagement and burnout performed better in mathematics, and progressed at a faster rate, and aspired for higher educational degrees compared with students with more maladaptive profiles
Summary
Adolescence is a phase characterized by many individual and envi ronmental changes and challenges, and the majority of stu dents manage adolescence without any severe problems, some seem to experience rather negative shifts in their academic well-being during this time (Roeser et al, 1999). Some students may be highly engaged in their schoolwork with no signs of school burnout, others emotionally disengaged from school with elevated levels of burnout, and yet others simultaneously highly engaged in their schoolwork while experiencing exhaustion due to school demands (Salmela-Aro & Upa dyaya, 2020; Tuominen-Soini & Salmela-Aro, 2014).
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