Investigating the interplay of student-teacher relationships, general anxiety, and school adjustment among Italian primary school children

ABSTRACT

School adjustment is an important factor in children’s, and research attributes an important role to the quality of the teacher-student relationship in predicting more favourable school adjustment. The purpose of this study is to expand our knowledge of the relationship between teacher-student relationship quality and school adjustment (academic achievement, peer social preference, and problem behaviour) by examining the possible mediating role of general anxiety. We recruited a sample of 1135 Italian primary school students (51.6% girls, aged 6 ~ 10 years, M = 7.7; SD = 0.99) and their teachers who completed an anonymous questionnaire. Results showed that a close teacher-student relationship was significantly and negatively associated with problem behaviours and positively associated with peer social status and academic achievement. Conversely, our data showed that a high-conflict teacher-student relationship was significantly and positively associated with problematic behaviours and negatively associated with peer academic achievement and social status. Our data also suggested a mediating role of general anxiety in explaining the association between a conflictual relationship with the teacher and measures of academic achievement. In this sense, a high-conflict relationship tends to be associated with high levels of general anxiety, which in turn is associated with more in problematic behaviour and worse peer social status and academic achievement.

KEYWORDS:

• Student-teacher relationships
• school adjustment
• anxiety
• academic achievement
• social preference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Code availability

For this research we used SPSS 26 software available from our University.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Shanyan Lin

Shanyan Lin, PhD candidate in Developmental and Educational Psychology in the Department of Psychology, University of Turin. His main research interests are psychological and educational research methods, student teacher relationship and adolescent’s social media.

Francesca Giovanna Maria Gastaldi

Francesca Giovanna Maria Gastaldi, Ph.D, is a researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Educationa Science. Her main research interest are the student teacher relationship, children drawings, school well-being.

Claudio Longobardi

Claudio Longobardi, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Turin. His main research interest is the study of typical and atypical child development, student-teacher relationship and bullying behavior.

Matteo Angelo Fabris

Matteo Angelo Fabris, PhD, is a Researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Turin. His main research interests are the child abuse and neglect, body image risk factor in adolescence, and student teacher relationship.