Estilo comunicativo del profesorado de secundaria: efectos sobre el rendimiento académico y el bienestar psicológico.

Abstract

Schools are the place where first social and emotional experiences take place and where students spend most of their time. Thus, it may not seem surprising that many studies find consistent evidence of the influence teacher and schools have on student well-being (Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Han, 2021; Mouratidis et al., 2011; Tobia et al., 2019). In these contexts, it is common to examine student’s flourishment through through indicators of wellbeing, among which academic performance stands out (Lerner et al., 2005; Smith & Bärker 2009). For instance, poor performance repercussions have found to extend into the future. In this sense, research shows that adults who drop out from school are at increased risk of developing health problems (Blankson & Blair, 2016; Levpušček et al., 2013). Given that many Spanish students are performing below their potential (Veas et al., 2017), we face a major educational challenge. One possible approach to address such issue is to examine which school variables contribute to student well-being and academic performance. Among these, teachers and their teaching practices have shown to be key for adolescents’ positive development (Aldrup et al., 2022; Chetty et al., 2014; Kunter et al., 2013; Leon & Liu, 2017). Within these teaching practices, researchers have begun to examine the impact the different teacher messages can have on students, with promising results (Caldarella et al., 2020; León et al., 2017; Ntoumanis et al., 2017; Putwain & Remedios, 2014). For example, according to message framing theory (Rothman & Salovey, 1997), messages that appeal to fear and this, emphasize disadvantages of not engaging in an activity (i.e., loss frame messages) have shown to trigger anxiety among students (Symes, 2011b, 2011a). Despite the evidence, the impact messages that highlight the advantages of engaging in an activity (i.e., gain-framed messages) have on students has been largely ignored. Additionally, within the framework of self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2017, 14 2020), teacher messages have been studied as a way of displaying informative or controlling language (e.g., "you must/should" vs. "you may/could"; Cheon et al., 2020; Haerens et al., 2015; Jang et al., 2016; Weinstein et al., 2018, 2019). However, this way of examining teacher messages does not contemplate the content of the messages. In other words, teachers may try to engage students in schoolwork by appealing to specific kinds of motivation (i.e., study for fun or study for recognition). Examining such messages solely in terms of the language that accompanies them misses the impact that appealing to certain kinds of motivations may have. Moreover, while the current research focus has been on one type of message or another, teachers can actually be incorporating different types of messages into their discourse to engage their students in school tasks. Attending what has been just exposed, the present thesis aims to fill in these gaps in research by examining the relation between teacher engaging messages (i.e., “If you work hard, you will learn interesting facts” or “If you don’t work hard, you’ll get into trouble”), academic performance, and student well-being, as well as other variables that may be involved in these processes. More specifically, this work has the following general aims: 1) Assess the relation among teachers engaging messages and students’ psychological functioning, academic performance, and motivational processes; 2) Examine the differential usage of messages by teachers and whether they can be grouped in different profiles based on their tendency to rely on one or another type of messages; 3) Examine antecedents of teachers’ engaging messages to establish future intervention targets. To achieve these goals, we conducted three different studies. The first study presents a newly developed scale to assess teacher engaging messages. Following a multilevel structural equation modelling (ML-SEM) approach, it assesses the relations among teacher messages, student motivations, and academic performance. Results showed that teachers engaging messages were related with students’ motivation to study, and this, in turn, with their 15 academic performance. The second study relied on a mixed structural equation modelling (ML-SEMM) and aimed at identifying profiles of students according to their teachers’ use of engaging messages and analysing the relation among these profiles and teacher-student relatedness and students’ subjective vitality. Overall, at both levels of analysis, teachers’ engaging messages related with teacher-student relatedness (either positively or negatively) with clear differences among profiles. Moreover, also at both levels of analysis, teacherstudent relatedness related with students’ subjective vitality. Finally, the last study performed a latent profile analysis to identify profiles of students based on the types of engaging messages teachers used with them. In a second step it was analysed how these profile related to students’ academic performance and, in a last step, how teachers’ own well-being (i.e., satisfaction/thwarting of basic psychological needs) predicted their use of engaging messages. In general, results indicated that teachers’ basic psychological needs were related to their use of engaging messages, and this was related to students’ performance. To sum up, the present work highlights a new resource teachers can use to improve their students’ well-being and academic performance by improving teacher-student relatedness and motivation to learn, respectively. Finally, while it is widely accepted that there is a strong connection between teaching practices and student outcomes, a fact illustrated in the third and previous research in this thesis (Collie et al., 2019), research on teachers’ well-being and its impact on their own teaching practices is scarce. Therefore, the present thesis not only contributes to the literature on effective teaching practices, but also reflects the importance of teachers’ own well-being in their performance as teachers.