Chinese students' perceptions of teacher–student interpersonal behavior and implications

Looking to relate: teacher gaze and culture in student-rated teacher interpersonal behaviour

“…Contrary to expectations in Hypothesis 2, UK (Western European) teachers received anticlockwise-leaning interpersonal behaviour ratings, suggesting greater agency than communion, whereas Hong Kong (East Asian) counterparts received clockwise-leaning ratings, suggesting greater communion than agency. Although past research has found East Asian teachers to be more agentic than Western teachers (e.g., Wei et al 2015), with value placed on maintaining the power distance in accordance with the Confucian heritage of such settings (e.g., Leung 2014), results in the present study might be explained by East Asian students' heightened sensitivity to agentic behaviour (cf. cultural differences in classroom apprehension: Morishima 1981;Zhang et al 1996).…”

“…1), whereas East Asian teachers would be perceived as anticlockwise-learning in comparison to their European colleagues (i.e., more agentic and less communing, see Fig. 1; Wei et al 2015) as represented in the IPC-T.…”

Classroom Social Environment as Student Emotions' Antecedent: Mediating Role of Achievement Goals

“…In addition, inconsistent with previous findings, teacher agency was not related to student enjoyment and anxiety. This may be due to a range restriction in agency in the current Chinese sample (compare Mainhard et al, 2018), which in turn may be rooted in a large power distance in Chinese classrooms (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010): Chinese students tend to expect teacher strictness (Wei, Zhou, Barber, & Den Brok, 2015), which may result in relatively homogeneous high levels of perceived agency in Chinese teachers. Nevertheless, when taking communion out of the model, teacher agency still explained 15-20% of the variability in student emotions.…”

“…One possible explanation could be that a certain type of teacher dominance, such as providing structure in class by setting clear rules and conveying high expectations rather than strictly controlling behavior, is beneficial for student learning (Roorda, 2011). It also needs to be considered that in the Chinese context teacher strictness is valued in class (Sun et al, 2018;Wei et al, 2015).…”

“…For example, although agency showed no direct association with student enjoyment, a very small indirect connection via student approach goals was observed. A possible explanation might be that despite Chinese students' rare direct reaction to teacher dominance in their pleasant emotions due to their high acceptance of teacher strictness (Wei et al, 2015), they may still experience a corresponding change in their personal approach goals which may slightly increase enjoyable feelings. This finding is consistent with previous findings that teacher agency enhances students' approach goals (Mainhard, 2015) and that approach goals foster pleasant emotions (Goetz et al, 2016).…”