Teachers and the Classroom Peer Ecology: How Can Peers Promote Academic Engagement in Early Adolescence?

Abstract

As youth navigate a complex system of individual, biological, social, and emotional changes, their motivation and engagement in school tends to decline. Simultaneously, peer relationships become more complex and critical to their daily lives at school. These opposing trajectories drive the central question of this dissertation: How can adolescents’ classroom peer relationships promote their engagement in school? Students form a variety of different relationships with peers, which are further embedded in a classroom social system wherein teacher and peer relationships co-occur. Across three studies, I investigated multiple configurations of teacher and peer relationships and probed whether the effects of one kind of relationship depended on another to better understand the supports and constraints on student engagement. Participants were 5th graders in elementary school and 6th graders in middle school who completed surveys in the fall and spring of one academic school year. Study 1 focuses on students’ psychological experiences of support to disentangle dyadic and classroom contextual influences on engagement. Students’ spring surveys (n=761) assessed their perceptions of classroom social satisfaction, best friend quality, and teacher-student relatedness, as well as peer and teacher support. Results from multilevel modeling indicated that both peer and teacher relationships are important for early adolescents’ behavioral engagement, but teachers play a primary role in shaping emotional engagement toward subject-area content. Moreover, both individual and classroom-level indicators of perceived support explained variation in children’s engagement outcomes. Study 2 centers explicitly on early adolescents’ classroom friendships to consider the conditions that propel friendships to be (more or less) beneficial in different social contexts. In the spring, students nominated their friends, as well as prosocial and disruptive peers in class (n=824). I used multilevel modeling to investigate how youth’s classroom friendship networks (i.e., best friend quality, number of reciprocated friendships, as well as friendship centrality and prestige) were related to their academic adjustment. Moreover, I considered whether these associations depended on classmates’ and popular peers’ behavioral norms. Results showed that academic adjustment was not contingent on friendship reciprocity, but it was positively associated with best friend quality and friendship centrality (i.e., being well-connected to many friends). Having high prestige (being highly desired as a friend) only demonstrated positive associations with behavioral engagement when popularity norms favored prosocial behavior, otherwise, it was negatively associated with academic adjustment. Finally, in study 3 (n=869), I tested several multilevel mediation models to investigate what aspects of adolescents’ classroom peer ecologies (i.e., friendship cohesion, prosocial behavior and norms, and peer support) play a mediating role in explaining the associations between teacher-student relatedness in the fall and classroom engagement in the spring. At the classroom-level, teacher-student relatedness was associated with greater adaptive help seeking with peers via prosocial popularity norms. At the individual-level, prosocial behavior mediated the association with behavioral engagement, while peer support mediated the link with all three engagement outcomes. Taken together, results from this dissertation reiterate the importance of investing in strong teacher-student relationships, while also demonstrating the unique affordances of specific types of peer relationships for students’ classroom engagement. Findings suggest that the relationships teachers form with students have motivational benefits that spillover into the formation of peer relationships. Moreover, it is especially critical for teachers to identify students who might be isolated from peers and create opportunities for them to form friendships.