Currently, many societies are placing a greater onus on academic achievement–resulting in higher levels of stress being observed among adolescent students. Stress can have detrimental repercussions on adolescents’ health and is also associated with anxiety and depression. However, since less is known about how high stress levels affect school engagement, this study examined the interplay of perceived stress and school engagement in a large sample of seventh and eighth grade students (N = 1088; MAge = 13.7) in secondary schools in Brandenburg, Germany. Based on self-determination theory (SDT), this study also examined if perceived autonomy, relatedness, and competence mediated the association between stress and school engagement in order to identify possible strategies for intervention and prevention. Latent structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test for the associations between stress, self-determination, and school engagement. Results showed that self-determination acted as a full mediator in the negative association between stress and school engagement. These results suggest that supporting students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence could be an effective starting point for prevention and intervention of stress and its negative association with school engagement. Consequently, SDT has strong implications for both school psychologists as well as teachers.

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In this study, we examined whether socio-motivational relationships, such as student-student relationships (SSR) and teacher-student relationships (TSR), as well as peers as positive motivators (PPM) and teachers as positive motivators (TPM), would mediate the association of both perceived stress and neuroticism with test anxiety in 1,088 German students from grades seven and eight. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that a high quality of SSR mediated the relationship between neuroticism and test anxiety, which was not the case for TSR. Furthermore, both PPM and TPM acted as mediators in all hypothesized associations. Interestingly, although a high quality of SSR mitigated feelings of test anxiety, PPM and TPM intensified test anxiety in neurotic students. The role of social relationships as protective factors as well as risk factors is discussed, as are the implications of the findings for educators, school psychologists, and teachers.