Identifying higher education students’ profiles of academic engagement and burnout and analysing their predictors and outcomes

Abstract

A review of research on the relationship between academic engagement and burnout reveals three research gaps as most of the research was conducted: i) without analysing all its multiple dimensions; ii) from a variable-centred perspective; and iii) in educational contexts other than higher education. We seek to address these gaps and thus enhance our understanding of the nature of the mentioned relationship. Adopting a person-centred perspective, a latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to identify how all the dimensions of academic engagement and burnout combine in different profiles of higher education students (n=430). Additional analyses were used to validate these LPA profiles by relating them to a set of auxiliary variables (i.e., predictors and outcomes), grounded on theoretical models relevant to higher education. LPA revealed three ordered profiles (burned-out, moderately engaged and engaged) and the additional analyses detected statistically significant associations between predictors (e.g., perceptions of academic quality, perceptions of stress) and profile membership; and between these and outcomes. The latter tended to be ordered from the least to the most desirable in learning strategies (e.g., self-regulation, deep processing) and learning outcomes (e.g., generic skills, satisfaction), with the most desirable generally being associated more with the two engaged profiles than with the burned-out profile. Taken together, the findings i) expand our understanding of the nature of academic engagement and burnout in higher education, suggesting that they are related but independent constructs at different levels (high/low and weaker levels), and ii) hold implications for theory, methodology and educational practice (adjusted to the distinctiveness of the detected profiles).