In this study we modelled possible causes and consequences of student burnout and engagement on academic efficacy and dropout intention in university students. Further we asked, can student engagement protect against the effects of burnout? In total 4,061 university students from Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Finland, Serbia, and Macao SAR, Taiwan participated in this study. With the data collected we analyzed the influence of Social Support, Coping Strategies, and school/course related variables on student engagement and burnout using structural equation modeling. We also analyzed the effect of student engagement, student burnout, and their interaction, on Academic Performance and Dropout Intention. We found that both student engagement and burnout are good predictors of subjective academic performance and dropout intention. However, student burnout suppresses the effect of student engagement on these variables. This result has strong implications for practitioners and administrators. To prevent student dropout, it is not enough to promote student engagement—additionally, and importantly, levels of student burnout must be kept low. Other variables such as social support and coping strategies are also relevant predictors of student engagement and burnout and should be considered when implementing preventive actions, self-help and guided intervention programs for college students.

Academic engagement describes students' involvement in academic learning and achievement. This paper reports the psychometric properties of the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) with a sample of 3992 university students from nine different countries and regions from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The USEI operationalizes a trifactorial conceptualization of academic engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive). Construct validity was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega coefficients. Weak measurement invariance was observed for country/region, while strong measurement invariance was observed for gender and area of graduation. The USEI scores showed predictive validity for dropout intention, self-rated academic performance, and course approval rate while divergent validity with student burnout scores was also evident. Overall, the results indicate that the USEI can produce reliable and valid data on academic engagement of university students across the world.

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Somos frequentemente confrontados com pessoas que fazem parte de múltiplas categorias, por vezes com implicações que conflictuam no que respeita aos estereótipos que lhes estão associados. Investigação anterior demonstra que, quando são gerados atributos para estereótipos compósitos, são criados os chamados atributos novos e emergentes. Estes parecem derivar do conhecimento acerca das categorias constituintes, mas também do conhecimento acerca do mundo em geral (e.g., Hastie, Schroeder, & Weber, 1990; Kunda, Miller, & Claire, 1990). O presente trabalho, de forma semelhante a investigação anterior de Kunda e colaboradores (1990), testa categorias profissionais compósitas, e as suas constituintes simples, numa amostra Portuguesa. De acordo com o nosso conhecimento, não existe evidência anterior, em língua Portuguesa, de que as categorias compósitas conduzam à geração de propriedades emergentes. Neste artigo, explora-se empiricamente o tipo de conteúdos que são gerados, e como é resolvido o conflito entre constituintes. No Estudo 1, os participantes descrevem 24 pares de categorias compósitas e cada um dos constituintes. No Estudo 2, refinamos a identificação dos atributos emergentes solicitando aos participantes que avaliem cada atributo previamente gerado numa escala de avaliação, para cada categoria, constituinte ou compósita, num desenho experimental entre-sujeitos. Os resultados fornecem evidência de que atributos emergentes foram gerados e revelou uma avaliação média para as categorias compósitas diferente daquela obtida nas categorias constituintes. Discute-se a contribuição destes resultados para investigação futura que pretenda explorar o tipo de processos que estão na base da criação de estereótipos compósitos, assim como a natureza da sua representação mental, quão estável é, e quão consensual, dadas as possibilidades de modelos e modos de resolução de conflito (e.g., Hastie et al., 1990; Kunda et al., 1990).

Although widely used in the judgment under uncertainty literature, the so-called Lawyer–Engineer problem does not have a Bayesian solution because the base rates typically oppose qualitative stereotypical information, which has an undefined diagnostic value. We propose an experimental paradigm that elicits participants’ subjective estimates of the diagnosticity of stereotypical information and allows us to investigate the degree to which participants are able to integrate both sources of information (base rates and stereotypical descriptions) according to the Bayesian rule. This paradigm was used to test the hypothesis that the responses (probability estimates) to the Lawyer–Engineer problem from more rational individuals deviate from normative Bayesian solutions in a way that shows smaller but more systematic bias. The results further suggest that the estimates of less rational participants are noisier (less reliable) but may be more accurate when aggregated across several problems.