Teacher-Student-Relationships and Student Outcomes in Heterogeneous Educational Settings: A Systematic Review of Meta-Analyses

Especially in diverse educational settings, positive relationships between students and their teachers can foster students’ learning and help alleviate systematic inequalities. Characterized by emotional warmth or closeness, positive teacher-student relationships (TSR) can improve several student outcomes. For instance, existing meta-analyses suggest significant links between TSR and students’ peer relations, school engagement, academic achievement, emotions, executive functions, general well-being, and reductions in aggressive or disruptive behaviors. However, the evidence on these links is scattered, and a comprehensive overview of the associations with TSR integrating academic, behavioral, socio-emotional, motivational, and general cognitive outcomes is lacking. Furthermore, researchers have been unequivocal about possible moderators, such as how these relationships vary with student age or gender. In light of these research gaps, we systematically reviewed the meta-analytic literature and examined (a) the extent to which academic, behavioral, socio-emotional, motivational, and general cognitive student outcomes are related to TSR in the meta-analytic literature; (b) which moderators influence this association; and (c) the methodological quality of the included meta-analyses. We included meta-analyses with preschool or K-12 samples in our dataset which reported some measure of the relation between TSR and student outcomes. With this dataset, we systematically mapped the evidence on (a) the TSR-outcome relationship; (b) the moderators; and (c) the methodological quality of the meta-analyses. We will present our core findings and discuss future research with this second-order, meta-analytic dataset and the impact of positive TSR in diverse and heterogeneous settings.