Agency and communion of teacher behavior in dyadic interactions with primary school children of different social groups. Interrelations with the teacher's implicit theory of relationships and the child's motivation and inclusion in the cooperation peer network of the class

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Bettina Hannover
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495975625

In inclusive education in primary school, children with very different learning preconditions are to be individually supported. This is a challenging task for the teacher: Does s/he succeed in showing behavior toward each individual child that is adapted to the learner's needs and requirements and thus favorable for the child's academic development? Interpersonal behavior is always characterized by a combination of values on the two universal orthogonal dimensions of communion (e.g., warmth, satisfaction of needs) and agency (e.g., guidance, competence) and is complementary: strongly communal behavior fosters strongly communal behavior in the other person, whereas strongly agentic behavior makes weakly agentic behavior more likely (complementarity principle). We have teachers describe their behavior toward each child in their class on eight facets in a circumplex of different combinations of communion and agency. To test which teacher behavior is particularly supportive, we predict child motivation from teacher behavior (in the teacher-child dyad (L1) and on the class level (teaching style, L2)) in multilevel analyses. Motivation should be highest with strong communion and teacher agency complementary to the child's competence: a child with still relatively low competence benefits from stronger agency, a child with relatively high competence from weaker agency. We capture the extent of individualized support by the strength and direction of the correlation between teacher agency and the objectively measured competence of the child. Due to social referencing processes, teacher agency complementary to the child's competence should also be associated with strong integration of the child into the cooperation peer network: If the teacher's agency is too strong compared to the child's competence, the peers underestimate the child's competence, and if the agency is too weak (i.e., if the teacher's behavior tends to be ignoring), the peers are less likely to consider the child as a cooperation partner. We also examine whether the teacher's implicit theory that a teacher-student relationship is modifiable favors strong communion and agency complementary to the child's competence. We further assume that objective characteristics of a child (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status) trigger spontaneous categorization processes, as a result of which the child is perceived in a certain way on the dimensions of communion and agency (e.g., low communion and low agency in the case of low socioeconomic status), and complementary behavior is encouraged in the teacher (low communion and high agency in the example). After controlling for children's competence, we examine whether the communion and agency of the teacher's behavior differs toward children depending on these (combined) grouping characteristics. This could help explain differences in motivation and social inclusion across groups (e.g., why children with low socioeconomic status report lower motivation).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Alice H Eagly