The aim of the doctoral thesis was to examine the effects of the quality of interpersonal relationships of adolescents on their learning motivation, achievements and behavior during the transition to secondary education, which represents a new social environment. The relationships in the adolescent's various microsystems were studied, i.e. the relationship with mother and father, best friend and class teacher. The quality of interpersonal relationships in the research refers to the adolescent's perception of socioemotional support in relationships. In addition to the connection between the quality of different adolescent's relationships, the focus was also made on the connections between the adolescent's social evaluation of education and academic support in different microsystems. Apart from the effects of the quality of interpersonal relationships on learning performance and behavior, I was also concerned with the effects of other psychosocial factors, such as the adolescents' motivational orientation, their personality traits and their family's socioeconomic status. I checked for the stability of the connections in one-year interval, i.e. in the first and second year of secondary education. In the research, I constructed and confirmed the construct and convergent validity and reliability of the Questionnaire of Perceived Academic Support, Questionnaire of Social Evaluation of Education and the Network of Relationship Inventory, which was translated in and adapted to Slovenian language for the first time. 668 male and female students from various secondary school programs in Slovenia and 37 class teachers participated in the research and the sample in the research was based on the sample of the PISA 2012 survey. With the Inventory of Child Individual Differences, Network of Relationship Inventory, the Questionnaire of Social Evaluation of Education, the Questionnaire of Perceived Academic Support and the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales, students self-reported on their personality traits, perceived social evaluation of education, academic support and their motivational orientation. Data on the socioeconomic status of the family and learning achievement were retrieved from the PISA survey. With the School Social Behavior Scales, the class teachers assessed the students on the scales of adaptive and maladaptive learning behaviors. The Cross-sectional and longitudinal effects between the quality of relationships, other psychosocial factors, motivational orientation and learning achievement and behavior were analyzed with the method of cross-lagged panel analysis and the method of hierarchical linear modeling. The results of the research showed that the quality of different interpersonal relationships of adolescents, their perceived evaluation of education and perceived academic support among different microsystems in both the first and second year were significantly related. Furthermore, the results confirmed that the quality of the relationship with mother, friend and class teacher longitudinally predicted the mastery-goal orientation of the student, i.e. internal motivation to learn. Mastery-goal orientation was also an important predictor of adaptive learning behavior in both first and second year. Another important finding of the study is that the quality of the student's relationship with the class teacher plays an important role in explaining maladaptive learning behaviors, in terms of hostile, irritable, antisocial, aggressive, defiant and disruptive behaviors, and the quality of the relationship with mother plays an important role in explaining adaptive learning behaviors. Comparing the effect sizes of the quality of interpersonal relationships and other psychosocial factors of learning achievement and behavior, it has been found that the socioeconomic status of the student, personality traits, such as unacceptability, neuroticism and extroversion, and motivational orientation have greater explanatory power in explaining learning performance and behavior compared to the quality of relationships. The results of the research show the importance of considering the quality of relationships in different social contexts of adolescents in promoting learning motivation and adaptive learning behavior, and also show the important role of socioemotional support of teachers, which seems important especially for students with maladaptive behaviour patterns. The results of the study are important from the point of studying the effects of interpersonal relationships on different aspects of the learning process, simultaneously considering different social contexts of adolescents and placing the effects of interpersonal relationships in the broader context of other important psychosocial factors.
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