How classroom social dynamics shape academic engagement: The role of peers, teachers, and their interplay.

Academic engagement has been shown to be an important predictor of adolescents’ school success. This project focuses on the role of teacher and peer experiences, and their interplay, in the development of academic engagement in early adolescence. First, it seeks to improve insight into the peer social ecology dynamics involved in academic engagement development, taking into account the multidimensionality of peer experiences (e.g., sociometric and perceived popularity, emergence of cliques as normative contexts for behavior), and searching for selection and socialization effects. Second, it aims to clarify the way teachers shape the classroom peer ecology and academic engagement trajectories. The study will use data from two ongoing three-wave longitudinal studies in early adolescence (7th to 9th grade), one in a community sample (N=1111) and the other in sample with high socio-demographically risk (N=3121). Main instruments consist of student self-reports of academic engagement and teacher-student relationships, and peer/sociometric nominations. Data will be analyzed using multilevel modeling (latent growth modeling, growth mixture modeling, social network analysis using continuous time modeling) and cross-lagged models controlling for the hierarchical data structure.