Around the world, education is an essential stepping stone towards any societal development. Academic achievement, which comes as a result of formal education offered in any society, is of utmost importance for the wealth of a nation and its prosperity. This is because academic achievement is used as a pointer to one’s ability, a prerequisite to university entrants, and a determinant of one’s career and job placements in society. For this reason, therefore, learners are under constant pressure for good academic grades.
However, when a lot of pressure is exerted on learners without adequate supportive mechanisms, they become susceptible to academic burnout. Academic burnout is defined as a feeling of exhaustion due to high academic requirements and demands which make learners develop negative attitudes and pessimistic feelings about assignments.
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Academic burnout comprises of three main sub-categories: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy. Emotional exhaustion is a condition that arises from the academic pressure exerted upon the students for academic excellence. Cynicism emerges when learners are not able to excel as expected, and as such, they tend to become indifferent and develop a negative attitude towards academic work. Academic inefficacy which comes as the last phase of academic burnout refers to a feeling of inadequacy and a diminished feeling of competence leading to low academic achievement.
students who experience academic burnout exhibit characteristics such as negative perceptions of the learning environment, high levels of perceived workload, lack of enthusiasm in subjects of study, inability to constantly attend classes, lack of participation in classroom activities, and meaninglessness in academic activities, resulting in poor academic achievement.
BURNOUT
Burnout is defined as a physical, emotional and psychological disorder and illness that can occur when work is psychologically very challenging and also requires continuing efforts, participation and contribution from a particular person.
Burnout is also seen as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and cynicism that occurs frequently among individuals who do ‘people-work’ of some kind.
Academic burnout can be defined as a negative emotional, physical and mental reaction to prolonged study that results in exhaustion, frustration, lack of motivation and reduced ability in school. It is rather more of a chronic condition from long-term study or school work.
Therefore, Students experiencing frequent burnout symptoms will, therefore, be unable and unwilling to expend effort on study-related tasks. Accordingly, this lack of effort is likely to inhibit academic achievement.
CAUSES OF BURNOUT
Academic burnout comprises of three main sub-categories: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy.
Emotional Exhaustion
Exhaustion related to stress that a person experiences, exhaustion reduces the physical and emotional resources of that person subsequently. It is the major element of burnout. Emotional exhaustion is the demand of work situation or environment that lowers the ability of a person to work with other people. Emotional exhaustion reduces the ability of a person (like student, employees, teachers) to interact with other people and to fulfill their desires and demands. Burnout syndrome begins with emotional exhaustion, it is the first component of burnout and then it leads to depersonalization and then due to exhausted people businesses do not succeed and fail. The people who usually try to accomplish the demands and responsibilities of their families face fatigue, tiredness and exhaustion at their work.
Cynicism
Cynicism occurs when people behave immorally in the society and this behavior considers as a normal behavior. In other words cynicism arises when people show negative behavior towards their tasks, work, jobs, society and people, so, it is a negative term. Therefore, become negative, distrustful, cynical and unenthusiastic for other people and objects is cynicism, as it is showing negative attitude towards institute or organization therefore it unable the people and institutes to achieve their objectives and goals. Cynicism directly effects on the academic satisfaction of students and indirectly effects on their academic achievement and overall performance.
Academic self-inefficacy
Academic efficacy could be describe as, with the help of motivation and engagement, students’ abilities to discover the opportunities and to find out barriers in the way of getting those opportunities. The academic efficacy increases academic performance in the presence of academic engagement. self efficacy of teachers have an influential result on the students, when teachers provide comfortable environment then students have more confidence and show positive attitude towards their studies which leads to high academic performance and achievement.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
Student’s academic performance in terms of education can be define as, the measureable, assessable and observable actions of students in a specific condition like students’ scores in examination.
Academic achievement or academic performance is the extent to which a student, teacher or institution has attained their short or long-term educational goals. Completion of educational benchmarks such as secondary school diplomas and bachelor's degrees represent academic achievement.
Academic performance is the measurement of student achievement across various academic subjects. Teachers and education officials typically measure achievement using classroom performance, graduation rates and results from standardized tests.
HOW BURNOUT AFFECT STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE
Students are the essential part of institutes and the progress of institutes depends on them, similarly, they mainly contribute in the prosperity of the country. But now-a-days students are suffering from many problems in their institutes, due to the burden of work and technological changes they are getting stressed and facing burnout syndrome. Performance here is the sum of abilities, motivation and opportunities.
Academic performance is described as the academic grades and performance of students in exams. So, Performance reduces when students faced burnout syndrome. people who are facing the burnout problems are more likely to engage in absenteeism, less self confidence, low satisfaction to their work and turnover intentions. So, the burnout syndrome has become a critical issue for students and institutes because it directly affects the well-being of students and then as well their performance.
CONCLUSION
Students who experience academic burnout usually demonstrate symptoms such as: lack of participation in classroom activities, inability to maintain a steady presence in classroom and learning, and lack of interested to lessons. Individuals suffering from burnout feel exhausted, uninterested, and ineffective; instead of feeling energized, interested, and efficacious. Academic burnout may disrupt students’ enthusiasm to pursue learning and may have negative effect on academic performance
Learners experience academic burnout and this adds to the evidence that academic burnout is a warning signal to academic achievement. It is therefore recommended that an approach geared towards exploitation of students’ talents be adopted to enhance the acquisition of prerequisite competences for the 21st century skills, as opposed to an examination-oriented curriculum that creates academic pressure on learners.
It can be conclusively said that when academic burnout increases then motivation level decreases in students which automatically leads to poor academic performance of students.