Teacher Influences on Student Engagement: Integrating the Classic, the Current, and the Cultural

• In Event: Fostering Engagement for All: Advancing Socioculturally Inclusive Theory, Research, and Practice in Student Engagement

Abstract

Teachers play a pivotal role in shaping students’ educational experiences and outcomes, with their beliefs about student ability exerting significant influence on student motivation, engagement, and performance. Indeed, Hattie’s (2023) large-scale research synthesis highlights the powerful impact of teacher academic expectations, reporting a substantial effect size (d = 1.06) on student performance. This underscores a critical yet underexplored question: What are the mechanisms through which teacher expectations influence student outcomes? A comprehensive review shows that teacher’s role in promoting student engagement and achievement has been studied across three largely independent lines of research, each grounded in distinct theoretical traditions. The teacher expectation literature (e.g., Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Jussim et al., 2009) emphasizes how teachers’ beliefs shape their instructional behavior, which in turn influences students’ self-beliefs and performance. The literature on teacher’s emotional and instrumental support (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985; Pianta & Hamre, 2009) highlights the importance of warmth, encouragement, and instructional scaffolding in fostering students’ academic resilience and engagement. The teacher autonomy support tradition (Ahmadi et al., 2023; Reeve & Cheon, 2021) emphasizes the importance of respecting students’ perspectives, providing choice, and minimizing controlling language to support students’ intrinsic motivation.

This presentation synthesizes these three bodies of work to identify their areas of convergence (e.g., shared emphasis on the relational dimension of teaching), divergence (e.g., conceptualization of agency, support, and teacher intent), and, most critically, synergy. By bringing these domains into dialogue, I develop a unified model that clarifies the pathways through which teacher beliefs and behaviors shape student motivation, engagement, and both academic and non-academic outcomes (e.g., well-being, sense of belonging, aspirations). A central contribution of this model is its explicit incorporation of sociocultural moderators. Rather than assuming uniform effects, teacher expectations and support processes unfold differently depending on students’ immigration status, racial/ethnic identity, socioeconomic background, and gender. These contextual factors may amplify or attenuate the effects of teacher practices and need to be more explicitly theorized and measured in future research.

The presentation will highlight the following provocative/novel insights:
• From Silos to Synergy: Bridging Disconnected Literatures. The bodies of work on teacher academic expectations, emotional/instrumental support, and autonomy support have developed in isolation—despite all seeking to explain how teachers shape motivation. This presentation challenges that fragmentation by proposing a unified model that synthesizes these strands, arguing that integration is essential to fully capture teacher influence.
• Sociocultural Moderators Are Central, Not Peripheral. Rather than treating students’ race/ethnicity, SES, immigration status, and gender as control variables or subgroup checks, this presentation positions them as key moderators that shape how teacher expectations and support are experienced. It argues that teacher influence is filtered through culturally and structurally shaped lenses.
• Rethinking Expectation Effects: Beliefs Must Be Enacted. Traditional models imply a simple path: high expectations yield better outcomes. This presentation reconceptualizes that logic, arguing that expectations only gain impact when translated into meaningful support—emotional, instrumental, or autonomy-supportive. The key claim is that belief alone is insufficient without relational and pedagogical enactment.

Author

• Gregory Arief D. Liem, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University