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It has been repeatedly suggested that the affective quality of dyadic teacher–student relationships influences students' engagement and achievement (e.g., Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Hughes, 2011). A previous meta-analysis provided support for these associations (Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011). As the last 5 years have seen an exponential increase in studies about this topic, we updated the previous meta-analytic sample with recent studies. Moreover, it has generally been assumed that the association between teacher–student relationships and academic achievement can be explained by students' engagement (Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Tucker et al., 2002). However, relatively few empirical studies have actually examined this mediating role of students' engagement, and available studies showed somewhat inconsistent results (e.g., Hughes, Luo, Kwok, & Loyd, 2008; Lam et al., 2012). In the present study, meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) was used, which enabled us to investigate the mediating role of engagement in a meta-analytic sample with studies that often did not test this mediating role themselves. Thus, the present study contributes to the field in several ways: First, it provides an update to a previous meta-analysis on teacher–student relationships, engagement, and achievement. Second, it allows conclusions about mediation by engagement based on a much larger number of studies than before. Third, because there are differences between primary and secondary school, both in the professional roles of teachers (Bergin & Bergin, 2009; Hargreaves, 2000) and methodological characteristics of studies (Roorda et al., 2011), we examine whether engagement similarly explains associations between affective teacher–student relationships and achievement across primary and secondary school. Finally, as our meta-analysis also includes a substantial number of longitudinal studies, we are able to investigate whether direct and indirect associations among teacher–student relationships, engagement, and achievement hold over time (i.e., are also found in a subsample with longitudinal studies only).
Theoretical Perspectives
Two theoretical approaches that have been especially important in research about teacher–student relationships in connection with academic adjustment are social–motivational theories and the extended attachment perspective (Davis, 2003). Both approaches assume that students' engagement plays an important role in explaining the impact of teacher–student relationships on students' achievement. Students' engagement is considered to be a multidimensional concept and can be defined as “the quality of a student's connection or involvement with the endeavor of schooling and hence...