Browsing by Author "Mannonen, Oona"

The aim of this thesis was to view university students’ achievement goal orientations and burnout. The first research problem was to examine what kinds of achievement goal orienta-tion groups can be identified among university students. The second research problem was to examine how students with different achievement goal orientation profiles differ in how they experience burnout. The achievement goal orientations were divided into five different orien-tations: mastery-intrinsic, mastery-extrinsic, performance-approach, performance-avoidance and avoidance orientation. Burnout was defined as a psychological syndrome caused by long-term school related stress that includes feelings of exhaustion, cynicism and inadequacy. Previous achievement goal orientation studies have largely focused on children and younger students. Moreover, there has been few studies examining the link between achievement goal orientations and burnout, so this thesis aimed to introduce new information about this topic. The participants filled a survey which included achievement goal orientation and burnout in-struments. The respondents (n=122) were university students and they varied in age and state of studies. A person-oriented approach was applied as the students were classified to different achievement goal orientation groups using cluster analysis. The link between achievement goal orientations and burnout was examined using analysis of variance. Three achievement goal orientation groups were found in the data: mastery-oriented (45 %), performance-oriented (38 %) and avoidance-oriented (17 %). On average the students were quite mastery- and performance-oriented. The mastery-oriented students experienced least burnout and the performance-oriented the most. The performance-oriented students experi-enced exhaustion and inadequacy, whereas the avoidance-oriented students felt cynicism more than the other groups. The results imply that students who are differently oriented to their studies may differ in what they think about their wellbeing, although in this study the stu-dents overall didn’t experience severe burnout. Especially strong performance or avoidance orientation may cause burnout and thus have a negative impact on wellbeing. In the future it is important to pay attention to students’ wellbeing and also for example what kind of pres-sure and demands their studies and future possibly set for them.