Validation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey in Spanish adolescents.

BACKGROUND: There are a large number of studies in the literature on burnout and its negative consequences for health and psychological wellbeing. Use of the burnout index in the academic context has increased to the point of identifying even the adolescent population. Nevertheless, at the present time there is no validated instrument for evaluating this syndrome in Spanish high school students. In view of this, our study attempted to evaluate the factor structure and reliability of the Spanish version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) in a sample of high school adolescents. METHOD: The sample included 1,209 students in the autonomous region of Andalusia (Spain), of whom 47.1% were boys and 52.9% girls, with a mean age of M=15.07, SD=1.174). RESULTS: The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a model with 12 items showing good fit, distributed across three factors: emotional exhaustion, cynicism and academic efficacy. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that the proposed instrument has an excellent factor structure and internal consistency, and is useful for evaluating academic burnout in the adolescent Spanish high school population.

Instructional Changes Adopted for an Engineering Course: Cluster Analysis on Academic Failure.

As first year students come from diverse backgrounds, basic skills should be accessible to everyone as soon as possible. Transferring such skills to these students is challenging, especially in highly technical courses. Ensuring that essential knowledge is acquired quickly promotes the student's self-esteem and may positively influence failure rates. Metaphors can help do this. Metaphors are used to understand the unknown. This paper shows how we made a turn in student learning at the University of Almeria. Our hypothesis assumed that metaphors accelerate the acquisition of basic knowledge so that other skills built on that foundation are easily learned. With these goals in mind, we changed the way we teach by using metaphors and abstract concepts in a computer organization course, a technical course in the first year of an information technology engineering degree. Cluster analysis of the data on collective student performance after this methodological change clearly identified two distinct groups. These two groups perfectly matched the "before and after" scenarios of the use of metaphors. The study was conducted during 11 academic years (2002/2003 to 2012/2013). The 475 observations made during this period illustrate the usefulness of this change in teaching and learning, shifting from a propositional teaching/learning model to a more dynamic model based on metaphors and abstractions. Data covering the whole period showed favorable evolution of student achievement and reduced failure rates, not only in this course, but also in many of the following more advanced courses. The paper is structured in five sections. The first gives an introduction, the second describes the methodology. The third section describes the sample and the study carried out. The fourth section presents the results and, finally, the fifth section discusses the main conclusions.