Crafting the university experience. Investigating the link between students’ engagement, crafting behaviors and their effect on study resources and demands.

The university experience is inherently demanding, however, studying at university can also represent an enthusiastic and engaging adventure. The way in which energy may be depleted or fed through demands and resources, leading to motivational or health-impairment processes, has been explored and tested in working contexts through the lenses of the job demands-resources model. Moreover, research has shown that, to sustain motivation and wellbeing, key is the extent to which people proactively engage in behaviors aiming at increasing challenging and resourceful aspects of their tasks and decreasing hindering ones, i.e. engage in job crafting behaviors. Even though understanding how to increase engagement is recognized as being a core challenge in modern universities, only limited research has been conducted to test how study demands and resources relate to students’ engagement and exhaustion, and what is the role of study crafting behaviors in building resources and challenges at the origin of engagement. Drawing on the JD-R theory, we hypothesized that, based on their level of engagement, students make self-initiated changes to the levels of their demands and resources to better align these with their own abilities and preferences. In turn, these changes reflect in higher resources and lower demands, which are likely to influence students’ engagement and exhaustion over time. To test these assumptions, we sampled 245 undergraduate and masters’ students from two different universities in Italy. After estimating a measurement model, given the converged and proper solution obtained, we assess the goodness-of-fit of our specified structural equation model. Our model fitted the data well, supporting our hypotheses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to test whether and how students craft their study resources and demands.