The teachers-student relationship and school engagement: Mediating role of basic psychological needs

One of the most important issues in educational psychology is school engagement and academic achievement among students. Based on self system model, a set of contextual factors (relations with teachers like perceived autonomy, structure, and involvement) through personal psychological characteristics (autonomy, relatedness, competence) is related to school engagement. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of basic psychological needs on the relationship between student’s perceptions of the teacher–students relations, and school engagement. For this reason 1200 high school students, who were selected through cluster random sampling from Kermanshah city, completed a survey consisted of researcher-made scale of student’s perceptions of teachers-student relationship(support of autonomy, involvement, and structure), student’s basic psychological needs(autonomy, competence, relatedness), and school engagement(behavioral and emotional engagement). Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. In general, the results indicated that basic psychological needs mediated the relation between teacher–student relationships and school engagement. Data also suggested that need for autonomy has more effect on school engagement than need for relatedness and competence. Based on the results, we concluded that the basic psychological needs must be considered as an important variable in classroom.