Teacher-student relationships and motivation in high school science

The quality of high school students’ relationships with their teachers are central to their personal and academic success. Research across a range of teaching contexts shows that high-quality teacher-student relationships (TSRs) support students’ engagement, achievement, and school attendance (e.g., Roorda et al., 2011). In science specifically, TSRs are associated with improved engagement and confidence (Patall et al., 2018). It is clear that TSRs matter for students.

Generally, conversations about TSRs focus on whether a relationship is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. However, as many teachers know, relationships can be more complex than this.

There is a need to move beyond the positive and negative framing of teacher-student relationships to explore the range of relationships that present in a classroom. In doing so, we can start to better understand which features of relationships may be most important for supporting student motivation in Science.

This article shares key findings of our recently published study in the international Journal of Adolescence (Burns et al., 2022). This study identified 4 different types of TSR and how these relationships are associated with students’ science motivation.