Keywords

1 Introduction

Finland is a country in which students have been successful in the OECD’s PISA comparison studies. However, student wellbeing is an issue. Finland was ranked almost last in the OECD comparisons in terms of student happiness in school. In addition, there is a widening achievement gap, and some signs of segregation in the metropolitan area of Helsinki. Moreover, according to the OECD PISA study, the largest gap in achievement nationally is between native-born Finns and immigrants. Gendered wellbeing and achievement gaps are also present. Boys are more likely to be underachievers, whereas girls suffer from mental-health issues.

In the present paper I first describe the context of Finland, then I focus in particular on school-related health and wellbeing. I present the key models on which I base the results: the modern expectancy-value-cost theory and the related stage-environment fit theory, as well as the demands-resources model in the school context. I present results showing how school wellbeing (burnout and engagement in particular) changes during middle school and transitions to educational tracks, later in high school and gap years, and during third decade of life in tertiary education and the transition to working life. I also show how school wellbeing can spill over to other life domains, negatively and positively, through depression, excessive Internet use and life satisfaction, for example. The social context of parents, peers, and teachers plays a key role in the health and well-being of adolescents, too, and I focus on peer selection and influence effects, for example. Finally, I discuss some recent policy issues in Finland concerning the promotion of student engagement and wellbeing.

2 School Burnout in Research

Burnout has attracted the interest not only of the scientific community but also of the general public in the last few decades. Given the rationale that school is a place in which students work (Salmela-Aro and Tynkkynen 2012, p. 929), the three-component construct of burnout has recently been applied to the context of formal education (Salmela-Aro et al. 2009a; Salmela-Aro 2017; Walburg 2014): exhaustion due to school demands, a cynical and detached attitude towards school, and feelings of inadequacy as a student (Salmela-Aro et al. 2009a). Exhaustion refers to being tired, ruminating on school-related issues and experiencing sleep problems; cynicism implies an indifferent or distal attitude towards studying in general, a loss of interest in studying and not seeing it as meaningful; and a sense of inadequacy as a student refers to a diminished feeling of academic competence, achievement and accomplishment. It is possible to study these three dimensions of school burnout from the perspective of modern expectancy-value-cost theory (Eccles and Roesner 2009). Within this framework, the feeling of inadequacy as a student refers to having low expectations; having a cynical attitude towards school refers to the value component of the expectancy-value-cost model, which includes values such as attainment, utility, and interest; and exhaustion refers to the high emotional costs of studying (Salmela-Aro 2017).

Although a relatively new research topic, school burnout has rapidly captured international attention, a fact that reflects its perceived relevance in many countries (e.g., May et al. 2015; Meylan et al. 2015; Yang and Chen 2016; Herrmann et al. 2019). The phenomenon has been observed among students in countries with different educational systems and academic policies, thus indicating that it is neither culturally nor geographically restricted (Walburg 2014). Although this paper focuses on Finland, the results are largely generalizable to other countries. According to PISA surveys, 15-year-old students in Finland outperform their peers in other countries. However, there is a large gap between native Finns and immigrants, and between boys and girls. In this paper, I present recent findings on school burnout and engagement in the context of the new challenges of digitalization and diversity that schools are facing. Today’s teenagers outperform all previous generations in terms of Internet use, and ethnic diversity has become the rule rather than the exception in most European countries, including Finland. According to the OECD, the definitive test of how effectively immigrants integrate into their receiving societies is how well their children are doing. Positive school adaptation is a precursor of future adaptation among young people, hence school burnout may have negative, possibly cascading, future consequences. The promotion of positive school engagement is thus of paramount importance for the future success and wellbeing of young people and society.

The demands-resources model adapted for use in the school context (Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya 2014) and the stage-environment fit theory (Eccles and Midgley 1989; Salmela-Aro and Tynkkynen 2012) could help to explain school burnout and engagement. The two theories approach school burnout as a mismatch between individual needs and the demands imposed by the school context, causing students to experience energy depletion without gaining appropriate returns, and engagement as a match between these needs and demands. The key psychological needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness (see also self-determination theory, Deci and Ryan 2000). According to the adapted demands-resources model, the more school-related demands that students experience, the higher their level of school burnout, whereas the more resources they possess, the stronger their engagement. Consequently, two processes can be identified: a motivational process according to which resources lead to increased motivation, and a health-impairment process during which demands lead to strain and impaired health. In support of the model, longitudinal research results show that school burnout and engagement also spill over from the domain-specific school context to general ill- and wellbeing (Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya 2014): burnout predicts later depressive symptoms, whereas engagement predicts later life satisfaction. Moreover, the spillover is not restricted to wellbeing, and also extends to further educational choices, achievements and pathways. Findings from longitudinal studies indicate that school engagement predicts higher grades, successful transition from high school to tertiary studies, and later satisfaction with chosen educational pathways. School burnout, in turn, predicts involuntary gap years after high school, lowered educational aspirations, and a fourfold greater likelihood of dropping out. In line with the stage-environment fit theory, the risk of school burnout is greater when the school context does not support the psychological needs of students.

Longitudinal studies conducted in the school context show that when students are autonomously motivated to pursue their educational goals, they invest more effort in them and thereby achieve high levels of progress. High goal progression, in turn, is related to high levels of school engagement and success in future educational transitions, whereas low progress is associated with drop-out intentions and school burnout (Vasalampi et al. 2009).

3 Students at Elementary School: Growing Up in the Digital Era

Members of the current generation of young people are often described as digital natives (Prensky 2001). Most adolescents use mobile devices and social media for maintaining constant connections and hanging out with an extended network of peers. Patterns of socio-digital participation are nevertheless heterogeneous in that only some young people cultivate advanced computer and media skills, and pursue their interests by actively joining various network communities (Gee and Hayes 2011). Some investigators express concern that adolescents who are accustomed to dealing with intensive flows of information through working simultaneously with multiple media (i.e., media multitasking, Veen and Vrakking 2008), and navigating through relatively short fragments of text, may develop “grasshopper minds” (Carr 2010), rendering them unable and unwilling to embark on disciplined intellectual activity. It is also suggested that some young people are driven by harmonious passions in their engagement in intensive socio-digital participation (Vallerand et al. 2007), which enable them to develop their skills and competences, and to engage in increasingly more complex activities (Ito et al. 2010). Others, however, may develop obsessive passions (Vallerand et al. 2007) or even addictions that involve repeated participation in compulsive, monotonous activities related to computer gaming or surfing the Internet, for instance. Adopting (Bergman and Andersson’s (2010) person-oriented approach to examining homogeneous subgroups of students with varying initial levels and developmental trends of engagement and burnout, we identified four profiles (Salmela-Aro et al. 2016a) among students at elementary school: engaged, stressed, cynical, and burned out. The engaged students formed the largest group (50 % of the sample), with moderate scores on school engagement and relatively low scores on all three dimensions of school burnout. Students in the stressed group comprised 4 % of the sample, expressing very high levels of exhaustion and inadequacy, whereas those at risk of burnout (5 %) were characterized by high levels of all three components of school burnout. Finally, those in the cynical group (41 %) showed highly cynical attitudes towards school. The results further revealed that the cynical students were more likely to be males, whereas those who were stressed and burned out were more likely to be females. Those in the cynical group also reported that they would be more engaged at school if they could use digital devices in the classroom. Although the incorporation into formal education of socio-digital technologies to support pedagogical transformations such as inquiry-, phenomenon-, and game-based study practices might enhance student engagement, digitalization remains a double-edged sword.

Experiencing a high level of school engagement is beneficial for students in terms of academic performance and well-being (Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya 2012; Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013a), and this should therefore be among the main goals of modern pedagogies. However, although Finnish students show high mean levels of school engagement overall, we identified subgroups struggling with disengagement and cynicism. It has been suggested that the ways in which students use digital technologies out of school are out of sync with the presumably more traditional pedagogical practices of formal education. This phenomenon is known as the gap hypothesis (see e.g., Prensky 2001; Salmela-Aro et al. 2016b), as it concerns the gap between digital engagement and school-related engagement among adolescents. The hypothesis is that students who are engaged in learning via digital technologies out of school do not find traditional educational practices similarly engaging. This is in line with the above-mentioned findings that students who report more cynicism towards schoolwork also report that they would be more engaged in their schoolwork if they were able to make extensive use of digital technologies in doing it (Salmela-Aro et al. 2016b). Digitalization presents a new challenge to young people generally and in the school context. Our cross-lagged path models showed further that a cynical attitude towards school predicted later excessive Internet use after controlling for the previous level. Moreover, sleep problems mediated school burnout and excessive internet use.

4 Students at Middle School: Growing Up in Diversity

A further new challenge for today’s educational system, alongside digitalization, is increasing student diversity. For example, Finland has the widest gap between immigrants and natives in terms of academic achievement. Our results revealed an increase in school burnout during middle school (grades 7 to 9), and the burnout pattern was gendered.

Among girls the increase was in feelings of inadequacy as a student, whereas the boys, particularly recent immigrants, had an increasingly cynical and negative attitude towards school. One reason for this is the high demands on these students: Finnish schools do not provide enough support to help them to overcome language barriers and thereby to promote learning. However, burnout was lower among immigrant girls than among native Finns, a finding that could reflect the immigrant paradox among girls (see the special issue, Motti-Stefanidi and Salmela-Aro 2018). As posited in the demands–resources model, their resources for academic adaptation and resilience may stem from their personal and social resources (Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya 2014). Cynicism, which as already stated is increasingly prevalent among recent immigrant boys, has been shown to increase the risk of dropping out fourfold (Bask and Salmela-Aro 2013). The proneness of immigrant boys to displaying an increasingly cynical attitude towards school, and thus possibly to being at risk of dropping out, makes the process of integrating them into Finnish society even more demanding. At worst, these children disengage first from school, and then from society. Programs are needed that allow immigrant youth to experience school as a safe haven, support their learning and engagement, and combat discrimination. How well these young people perform in school is a major test for the receiving society and its educational system. It seems that Finland faces many challenges in this respect. Diversity should be understood as a resource rather than a risk for society as a whole.

5 Beyond High School

Finnish adolescents in post-compulsory academic education have been compared to those in vocational education for signs of school burnout and engagement (Salmela-Aro et al. 2008). According to the results, feelings of inadequacy are more likely to be experienced by students on an academic as opposed to a vocational track. The nature of the Finnish academic and vocational educational environments, and of the transition itself, strongly affects any changes in how students think and feel about their education (stage-environment fit, Wigfield et al. 1996). Eccles and Midgley (1989) suggested that negative developmental changes could ensue if young people were not provided with developmentally appropriate educational environments. A negative developmental fit may lead to school burnout if the educational context does not support the students’ psychological needs. It has been shown that the transition to high school is particularly stressful in view of the increased academic demands and changes in the sources of social support it involves. A recent study reported a 30-percent increase in school burnout among Finnish girls at high school over the previous two years. It also seems that school burnout increases across the years at high school (Sorkkila et al. 2018).

Tuominen-Soini and Salmela-Aro (2014) identified four profiles among a cohort of high school students: engaged (44 %), engaged-exhausted (28 %), cynical (14 %), and burned-out (14 %). High-school engagement may also be associated with burnout in that some students who experienced high engagement simultaneously reported high levels of exhaustion and low educational achievement. Students who simultaneously experienced high levels of both engagement and exhaustion felt more exhausted and stressed because of their high educational aspirations than those who only experienced engagement, who were more worried about possible failure and more readily gave up when faced with academic challenges. Nevertheless, most students experienced high levels of engagement and well-being, and only a small proportion reported low engagement and adjustment problems However, findings from the new millennium cohort indicated that the proportion of engaged students had fallen to 37 %, compared to rises to 45 % among the engaged-exhausted students and 18 % among the burned-out students.

It was reported in a recent study that the proportion of students suffering from school burnout is even higher among aspiring athletes at high school. Although the health benefits of practicing sport are widely acknowledged, increasing concern has been expressed about student-athletes who combine academic pursuits with high-level competitive sports, in that success in one domain often comes at the cost of failure in the other (Sorkkila et al. 2018). The European Commission (2012) acknowledges that high-achievement sport should be organized in a socially responsible manner to avoid school dropout among elite-level athletes. It was found that student-athletes were at risk of sport- and school-related burnout even at the beginning of upper secondary school, almost half of them risking burnout. Furthermore, symptoms of sport and school burnout increased and became more generalized over time, and school-related exhaustion spilled over to the sports domain. High individual and parental expectations at the beginning of upper secondary school were negatively related to burnout in the same domain, but positively related to burnout in the other one. Furthermore, mastery goals related to sport- and school-related achievement buffered against cynicism and feelings of inadequacy in the same domain, whereas school-related performance goals predicted school-related cynicism.

6 Study Burnout Increases During Higher Education

We adopted a person-oriented approach to identify the profiles of study engagement and burnout in higher education in a representative sample of 12,394 higher-education students at different phases of their studies in universities and polytechnics in Finland. Again, we identified four profiles: engaged (44 %), engaged-exhausted (30 %), inefficacious (19 %), and burned-out (7 %) (Salmela-Aro and Read 2017). The engaged students tended to be in the earlier stages of their studies, whereas the burned-out and the inefficacious had been studying the longest. This pattern indicates that students start out being highly engaged, and burnout becomes more common later in their academic career. In support of the demands-resources model, the covariates reflecting demands were higher, and those reflecting resources were lower, among the burned-out and inefficacious students than among the engaged. Some students who experience difficulties in graduating from higher education and thus prolong their studies are at an elevated risk of burnout: prolonging one’s studies is assumed to be stressful and to lead to cynicism concerning the meaningfulness of studying as well as feelings of inadequacy as a student. As a consequence, burnout also presents a risk of later dropout (Bask and Salmela-Aro 2013) and depression (Salmela-Aro and Upadyaya 2014). Further in line with the demands-resources model, the inefficacious and burned-out students reported more depressive symptoms than their engaged counterparts.

Our new analyses during the COVID-19 showed that remote learning increased university students’ burnout dramatically. Among a sample of 1500 university students from the University of Helsinki, 18 % suffered from severe burnout, whereas 29 % was engaged during remote learning. Moreover, 24 % was in risk of burnout and 29 % engaged-exhausted. These results need to be taken seriously.

Analyses of individual differences in the development of study engagement showed an increase in engagement among some students (14 %) following the transition to higher education or to working life (Salmela-Aro 2009; Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro, 2013b, 2017), possibly reflecting the better person-environment fit of the new study or work environment (Eccles and Midgley 1989; Eccles and Roeser 2009). Other studies have also shown that high engagement in school facilitates career choices, whereas many students who disengage from school feel that their studies are less significant and experience more insecurity concerning their career choices (Ketonen et al. 2016). Many young people starting out on their higher-education studies or their career may perceive the new environment as better suited to their future goals, thereby providing a better person-environment fit (Eccles and Midgley 1989; Eccles and Roeser 2009) and offering opportunities for change in engagement.

7 Social Context: Sharing Burnout and Engagement

Adolescents typically do not face challenging educational transitions alone but seek advice from and discuss opportunities with their significant others. This behavior is also posited in the life-span model of motivation (Salmela-Aro 2009). More specifically, it is argued that the goals of individuals going through critical transitions are influenced not only by their own beliefs and motivation but also by the perceptions, attitudes and expectations of significant others. Thus, affective support from their interpersonal environment during challenging educational transitions may be a critical resource for adolescents (Gniewosz et al. 2012). The influence of parents and peers on student choices has been particularly emphasized (Nurmi 2004). School- and work-related engagement and burnout always occur in a larger social context, which includes family, peers/coworkers, principals/management, and the school/work environment (Eccles and Roeser 2009). These contexts, together with the individual’s stage-environment fit, serve as a framework for understanding student engagement and burnout (Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013b). Mutual interaction between members of these different contexts serves as an ecological asset that promotes wellbeing.

With regard to family characteristics, several studies have shown that parental involvement, affection, monitoring, and support all promote engagement with school/work (Englund et al. 2008; Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013b; Wang and Eccles 2012). Close and supportive relationships, including parental affection in general (i.e., affective support and warmth from one’s parents), typically increase adolescents’ engagement in their studies during educational transitions (Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013b), and help them to attain their educational goals (Melby et al. 2008). Likewise, supportive relationships with peers have proved to be beneficial. Having friends and feeling accepted at school appear to support involvement and engagement in school-related activities (Wentzel et al. 2010, 2017), as well as fostering positive feelings about school (Estell and Perdue 2013) and good school performance (Ladd et al. 1997): all these things increase the likelihood of graduating from school (Véronneau and Vitaro 2007).

Parents, teachers, peers, coworkers, and supervisors serve as sources of support for students/young adults in promoting high engagement, adjustment to transitions, and educational and vocational success (Englund et al. 2008; Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013b). In the school context, teacher autonomy, support, and enthusiasm tend to have positive effects on student engagement (Watt et al. 2017). Parental autonomy and social support may serve as an environmental protective factor, and the more sources of social support one has, the higher one’s levels of positive outcomes and engagement (Duineveld et al. 2017; Rosenfeld et al. 2000). Multiple sources of support may serve as ecological assets among adolescent students, which together with strong high-school engagement promote positive youth development (Lerner et al. 2012) and a successful school-to-work transition: this, in turn, is a precursor of successful career development (Pinquart et al. 2003). Educational and occupational transitions are also optimal periods in which to make interventions designed to prevent the possible weakening of engagement. This, in turn, supports positive youth development and the overall adjustment of students and young adults to their new educational and vocational environments.

Moreover, recent research also attests to an increase in school burnout and related disengagement (Salmela-Aro et al. 2016b), and that some students who experience high levels of engagement simultaneously report high exhaustion and reduced well-being (Tuominen-Soini and Salmela-Aro 2014). Thus, it would be useful to examine student engagement and burnout conjointly (Salmela-Aro 2015, 2017). Similarly, there is a need for future studies to better identify the processes leading to disengagement, and to plan interventions that could prevent low and diminishing engagement trajectories among students and young adults (Symonds et al. 2016). Changes in engagement are especially prevalent during educational and vocational transitions, for example, which offer students and workers opportunities to make positive changes (Li and Lerner 2011; Upadyaya and Salmela-Aro 2013b).

8 Outlook

As a new policy, one way of facilitating continuing engagement among adolescent students and young adults would be to develop innovative transition programs designed to give them a deeper understanding of their study and career possibilities (Vinson et al. 2010), and to enhance their career exploration (Perry 2008). Such programs could feature a wide range of novel, innovative, and traditional activities (e.g., tutoring in small groups, undertaking research projects, Google mapping) with an emphasis on clarifying future possibilities and the purposes of student courses and activities (for more examples, see Vinson et al. 2010). Moreover, helping students to identify their intrinsic career values prior to the transition to higher education/work may also enhance engagement in school/work (Sortheix et al. 2013). Teachers and educators could incorporate such programs into their own teaching and thus support successful transition to higher education/work among students.