Poster #27 - Developmental trajectories and relationships of parent-teacher relationship, teacher-student relationship, and students’ learning attitude: A latent growth curve analysis

• In Event: Poster Session 08

Abstract

In recent years, home-school cooperation has been highly valued in China (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China’s, 2012, 2015; Wen, 2010). The parent-teacher relationship, regarded as the link between families and schools, has an important effect to home-school cooperation and children's school adaptation theoretically. However, there is relatively lacking of the empirical research on the relationship between parent-teacher relationship and students' academic adaptation in China context. Western studies have shown that the effects of different dimensions of the parent-teacher relationship on students are not exactly the same ((Serpell & Mashburn, 2012; Thijs & Eilbracht, 2012). This study examines the impact of the teacher-teacher relationship on the primary school students' learning attitude, and the mediating role of the teacher-student relationship, based on the longitudinal tracking perspective. Since 2018, this study conducted a follow-up survey of 4,102 fourth-grade primary school students and their parents in Beijing and Haikou for a period of 3 years and 3 times. The results showed that: (1) The contact frequency and relationship quality showed an upward trend in the upper grades of primary school, while the learning attitude and teacher-student relationship showed a downward trend; and the relationship between the initial level of relationship quality and its development speed was negative, that is, the higher the initial family-teacher relationship quality score, the slower the growth rate, while for the contact frequency, it was not significant. For learning attitude and teacher-student relationship, the higher the initial level, the slower the decline rate. (2) The parallel variable growth model shows that, in terms of mediating effect, the initial level of contact frequency can negatively predict the initial level of teacher-student relationship, and then affects the initial level and development speed of learning attitude. The growth rate of contact frequency can positively predict the decline rate of teacher-student relationship, and then affect the decline rate of learning attitude. That is, the higher the contact frequency between parents and teachers at the beginning, the worse the relationship between teachers and students, the worse the learning attitude of students, and the slower the descent speed of their learning attitude. The faster the growth of contact frequency, the faster the teacher-student relationship declines and the faster the learning attitude declines. The initial level of relationship quality positively predicts the initial level of teacher-student relationship, and then affects the initial level and development speed of learning attitude, that is, the higher the quality of family teacher relationship at the beginning, the better the teacher-student relationship, and the higher the initial level of students' learning attitude, the slower it declines. In terms of direct effect, after being mediated by the development speed of teacher-student relationship, the development speed of contact frequency can also negatively predict the development speed of learning attitude. The research reflects that the two aspects of parent-teacher relationship have different directions on children's learning attitude, which provides valuable information for understanding its role in children's learning attitude from the perspective of development, and also has some enlightenment for the practice of family school cooperation.

Authors

• Xinran Zhou, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Yufang Bian