Academic wellbeing among Danish upper secondary school students – defining, validating, and exploring academic wellbeing in relation to school environment factors

The article explores the academic wellbeing of upper secondary school students in Denmark. It discusses previous conceptualizations and ways of measuring academic wellbeing and finds that the field suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. It suggests a new definition of academic wellbeing, which is comparable to conceptions of general wellbeing. Empirically, the article is based on survey responses from 10.998 first year students. It finds the mean value of academic wellbeing for these upper secondary students to be 3.39 on a scale of 1-5. Additionally, it investigates the predictors of the upper secondary school students’ academic wellbeing and finds teacher relationship and students’ self-efficacy to be the strongest predictors. In addition to contributing a definition of academic wellbeing and empirical evidence on Danish students’ wellbeing, it contributes an instrument to measure academic wellbeing among upper secondary school students.