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 t…