UC Riverside

Teachers have many roles that make them influential in a child's overall development at school. The relationship formed between teachers and students early on may foreshadow adjustment and functioning of the student in later school years. A conditional latent curve model was fit to data from a subsample of the longitudinal Collaborative Family Study (n=84) and used to examine the effects of the student-teacher relationship (STR) change over time (ages 6-9) in predicting academic engagement at age 13 for both typically developing (TD) children and those with intellectual delays (ID). This model was then expanded to include the child characteristics of social skills and behavior problems in predicting STR. Results indicated that age 6 STR's predicted academic engagement at age 13; students who experienced more positive STR's very early in elementary school had higher levels of academic engagement in middle school. In addition, the child characteristics of social skills and behavior problems were predictive of the STR, and accounted for more variance within academic engagement than the STR alone. These findings emphasize the impact of the student-teacher relationship during the early school years, and underscore its importance for later formative experiences.