Adolescents’ socio-digital engagement and its relation to academic well-being, motivation, and achievement

This thesis examined how adolescents’ engagement with digital media is associated with academic and emotional functioning and the continuities and discontinuities between these two contexts. Towards that end, the gap hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that students who prefer learning with digital media outside of school are less engaged in traditional school, was examined both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Digital engagement was conceptualized as both socio-digital participation (i.e. adolescents’ multidimensional practices of participating in digital contexts) and connected learning (i.e. self-regulated learning extended across time, space, and various contexts). Academic and emotional functioning was conceptualized as academic well-being (i.e. school engagement and burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inadequacy), motivation (i.e. achievement goal orientations), and academic achievement (i.e. grades). The first aim was to determine the multidimensional structure of socio-digital participation orientations that students’ different digital activities reflect. The second aim was to examine the extent to which the orientations of socio-digital participation are related to academic and emotional functioning cross-sectionally and in different educational levels. The third aim was to examine the longitudinal relations of socio-digital engagement with academic well-being and academic achievement, especially focusing on the direction of the effects. This thesis consists of five original studies. In these studies, we used interview data, cross-sectional and longitudinal questionnaire data, and grades drawn from the registry. Various exploratory and confirmatory statistical methods, including both variableand personoriented latent variable modeling approaches, were used. Study I was aimed at theoretically and empirically conceptualizing the components of socio-digital participation. In Study II, the hypothesized gap between adolescents’ digital engagement, competencies, and academic motivation was evaluated. More precisely, we examined how students’ profiles of achievement goal orientations are associated with socio-digital participation and skills. The goal of Study III was to extend the investigation of the differences in young peoples’ approaches to socio-digital participation. First, the structure of the underlying orientations of socio-digital participation was examined across three samples of Finnish students. Second, we analyzed how these different orientations are associated with school engagement and burnout. In Study IV, the gap hypothesis was tested with longitudinal data. Finally, the goal of Study V was to expand our knowledge about how adolescents’ socio-digital participation is longitudinally related to school burnout and academic achievement. More specifically, Study V focused on the directions of effects among these constructs at the within-person level. The first main finding was that the variation in digital activities can be explained with a complex structure of socio-digital participation orientations, which appear to be consistent across different age groups. Of all forms of digital participation, youths reported spending the majority of their screen time engaging in friendship-driven digital social networking. However, some adolescents reported socio-digital engagement that reached out to a wider audience, including sharing their art, providing a game server to facilitate other people’s gaming activities, or building an extended network of developing expertise in the process. The second main finding was that there truly appeared to be a gap between adolescents’ digital and academic engagement. The results revealed that motivationally indifferent students were more likely to engage in social media and gaming. Students who preferred digital learning but did not have the chance to digitally engage at school experienced a decrease in school engagement over time. Moreover, cynicism towards school and feelings of inadequacy predicted increased engagement with social media and action gaming. The third main finding was that digital participation yields both demands and resources and that these are tied together via multiple processes. Social media engagement was cross-sectionally related to lower study engagement and/or to higher symptoms of burnout, especially exhaustion. Longitudinally, social media engagement and emotional exhaustion were reciprocally related at the within-person level; exhaustion predicted an increase in social media engagement and vice versa. In turn, knowledgeoriented digital engagement was cross-sectionally related to higher study engagement, and digital learning preference predicted higher schoolwork engagement over time. To conclude, adolescents’ socio-digital engagement is fundamentally multidimensional and should be treated as such. The results showed support to the gap hypothesis, but the results also suggest that the manifestation of this gap is dependent on multiple factors, both individual and contextual. The gap might emerge because of out-ofschool digital engagement that is not recognized in school or the gap might emerge due to problems in school leading to increased time spent with digital media. Intensive sociodigital engagement may also increase the daily psychological demands to such an extent that it hinders schoolwork, leading to symptoms of school burnout, but it can also increase the psychological resources supporting schoolwork given that congruence with academic practices is achieved.