Developmental process of academic burnout among Korean middle school students

•This study identified causal sequence of academic burnout.•Burnout starts from either exhaustion or inefficacy and ends with cynicism.•Exhaustion and inefficacy should be recognized as initial symptoms of burnout.

This study examined the longitudinal relationships between three dimensions of academic burnout—emotional exhaustion, cynicism and academic inefficacy—by considering Korean middle school students. A total of 405 middle school students participated in the survey (Time 1: n = 367, Time 2: n = 382, Time 3: n = 375). They were conducted at the end of every semester for three times at a 6-month interval (grade 7th-2, 8th-1 and 8th-2). Most participants were 13 years old at the time of the first survey; 56.6% (n = 229) of them were female. We used the Korean version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory—Student Survey to measure the level of academic burnout; we also employed autoregressive cross-lagged modeling with Amos 18.0 to explore the longitudinal relationships between the three dimensions. As a result, all autoregressive coefficients were found to be significant. That is, paths from emotional exhaustion at Time 1(2) to emotional exhaustion at Time 2(3), from cynicism at Time 1(2) to cynicism at Time 2(3) and from academic inefficacy at Time 1(2) to academic inefficacy at Time 2(3) were statistically significant. In addition, the results revealed that the cross-lagged coefficients from emotional exhaustion at Time 1(2) to cynicism at Time 2(3) and those from academic inefficacy at Time 1(2) to cynicism at Time 2(3) were statistically significant. All other cross-lagged coefficients were not significant (i.e., from emotional exhaustion to academic inefficacy, from cynicism to emotional exhaustion, from cynicism to academic inefficacy and from academic inefficacy to emotional exhaustion). These results have important implications for the prevention of academic burnout and for future research.