Chapter 6: The Study Demands-Resources Model of Student Engagement and Burnout: The Role of Personal and Contextual Factors

Student engagement and burnout have gained significant attention in recent research in the fields of education and psychology due to their ability to offer comprehensive insights into students’ academic and psychological well-being (Salmela-Aro &Upadyaya, 2014; Wong et al., 2024). Student engagement and burnout are also recognized for their potential to forecast unfavorable outcomes, such as academic underperformance, student mis-behavior, and study dropout (Li &Lerner, 2011). Both student engagement and burnout have been explored extensively across various age groups, student characteristics, and educational contexts (Salmela-Aro et al., 2022; Vansoeterstede, 2023; Walburg, 2014). These studies have also indicated some gender differences in student engagement and burnout, as well as contextual factors which lie behind academic well-being (Salmela-Aro et al., 2022; Vansoeterstede, 2023). Recently, the study demands-resources model has been established as a framework for examining the associations between student engagement and burnout, their antecedents and outcomes (Salmela-Aro et al., 2022; Salmela-Aro &Upadyaya, 2014). The present chapter illustrates these associations further, focusing on personal, in particularly demographic (gender, immigrant status) and contextual (family background and school environment) factors which may create differences in academic well-being, and describing them in the broader sociocultural contexts (ecological systems model) (Bronfenbrenner, 1994).