Sustainable Education Challenges: Structure of Educational Burnout and Associations with Problematic Overstudying

Globally increasing educational pressures and associated decreases in well-being among adolescents and young adults make educational burnout a major challenge in sustainable education, which is becoming more systematically investigated. This paper overviews previous studies on the structure of educational burnout. It provides new data on the validity of the School Burnout Inventory (SBI) among 650 Polish university students, including associations between educational burnout and problematic study-related attitudes and behaviors, stress, and anxiety. The original three-factor structure of the SBI was revised to a two-factor model due to the collinearity between cynicism and a sense of inadequacy. The adjusted model demonstrated a good fit and was cross-validated in an independent subsample. The SBI showed good reliability. Exhaustion was strongly and positively correlated with study overload. It showed a more consistent pattern of correlations with problematic study-related attitudes and behaviors than the cynicism/inadequacy component, which showed distinctive associations with learning competencies (learning self-efficacy and study enjoyment). Both components showed relatively strong positive correlations with stress and anxiety. The findings suggest that educational burnout is significantly associated with problematic overstudying and well-being, with exhaustion playing a central role in this construct. This research contributes to understanding educational burnout and its components in a Polish academic context, highlighting the importance of preventing its development to enhance student well-being and educational outcomes.