School burnout and engagement profiles among digital natives in Finland: a person-oriented approach

Abstract

Applying a person-oriented approach, this study set out to examine what profiles of school engagement and school burnout (i.e., exhaustion, cynicism, inadequacy) can be identified among elementary school children at age 12, a generation also often referred to as the generation of digital natives. We compared the group memberships in their use of socio-digital technologies and related functioning as we expected to find a gap between some digital natives and current educational practices which do not include socio-digital technology in feelings of cynicism towards school. Latent profile analysis identified five groups: Engaged (50%) students, who formed the majority; Stressed (4%) students, who reported high exhaustion and high inadequacy as a student; Students High in cynicism (burnout group) (5%) with high scores on all the components of school burnout, particularly cynicism, but also on exhaustion and inadequacy as a student; students Moderate in Cynicism (15%), whose cynicism was directed in particular towards studying and school; and, finally, students Emerging Cynicism (bored group) (26%), whose feelings of cynicism were nevertheless elevated. These results thus revealed that almost half (46%) of the elementary students felt some degree of cynicism towards school, thereby supporting our gap hypothesis: these groups of cynical students reported that they would be more engaged at school if socio-digital technologies were used at school. These results indicate that one way to promote the engagement of cynical students might be to offer them the possibility to make greater use of socio-digital technologies at school.

Keywords:

• School engagement
• school burnout
• profiles

Funding

This study is part of ongoing Mind-the-Gap between Digital Natives and Educational practices project (Academy of Finland 265528). It has also been supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's grant to Kimmo Alho and Academy of Finland project 273872 (TULOS program) to Katariina Salmela-Aro.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.