Abstract
Emotional burnout, a significant indicator of teachers’ mental health, affect both their teaching effectiveness and the interaction with children in early childhood education. A comprehensive longitudinal examination of the emotional burnout is important for enhancing ECE quality and promoting the professional and mental well-being of novice ECE teachers. We employed Growth Mixed Model (GMM) to examine the trajectory of emotional burnout among a prospective cohort study of 2,455 novice ECE teachers over a 24-month period after they just entry into the profession. Three domains of emotional burnout showed curvilinear patterns and separate into different trajectory classes. The study also examined the influence of several factors include, education background, rural or urban preschool, gender, and have internship or not, on novice ECE teachers’ emotional burnout trajectories. Factors showed various influence on the trajectory classes of each domain. The role of emotional burnout should be considered both in improving teachers’ professional skills and in providing suitable and comprehensive training for novice ECE teachers. The findings contribute to the existing theoretical framework on emotional burnout and suggest the need to integrate different factors into novice ECE teacher education programs and inform education policy aimed at fostering high overall quality of ECE.
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The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This work was supported by 2021 Guangdong Provincial College Innovation Team Project (Humanities and Social Sciences): “Innovative Team of Early Childhood Education Theory and Practice Research” (2021WCXTD030).
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Authorship contributionYuhong Lei: Validation, Supervision, Conceptualization. Fan Pan: Software, Methodology, Data curation. Qiuxia Guo: Projectadministration.
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Pan, F., Lei, Y. & Guo, Q. A longitudinal study on emotional burnout among a prospective cohort study of novice early childhood education teachers: change from entry to 24 months. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35199-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35199-w
