Trust and Discipline: Adolescents’ Institutional and Teacher Trust Predict Classroom Behavioral Engagement following Teacher Discipline

Abstract

This daily diary study examined how adolescents’ institutional and teacher‐specific trust predicted classroom behavioral engagement the day after being disciplined by that teacher. Within mathematics classrooms, adolescents (N = 190; Mage = 14 years) reported institutional and teacher‐specific trust and then completed a 15‐day diary assessing teacher discipline and behavioral engagement. The results indicated that, among adolescents with low teacher trust, discipline was unrelated to next‐day behavior. Contrastingly, adolescents with high teacher but low institutional trust became less engaged following discipline, whereas those with high teacher and institutional trust became more engaged. These findings suggest that adolescents interpret discipline within the social context of trust, and adolescents’ trust in the institution and teacher are important for discipline to improve behavior.

Perceiving teachers as procedurally just limits the negative effects of delinquent peer associations: An analysis of Australian adolescent boys’ and girls’ perceptions of school authority

“…More recent research has yielded mixed results. Amemiya et al (2020) did not find gender differences in perceptions of trust in teachers or schools in a sample of middle school youth from the United States. Using data from Pathways to Desistance, McLean et al (2019) found that boys, relative to girls, had slower growth in perceptions of legitimacy from middle adolescence into early adulthood.…”

Conceptualization and Measurement of Trust in Home–School Contexts: A Scoping Review

“…The trustor's role includes the propensity to trust which is established from past experiences and personal characteristics and is argued to be present at the beginning of a new relationship (Kikas et al, 2016;Amemiya et al, 2020). For example, teachers receiving new students in their school may have confidence that parents will work with them to the end, not because they know those parents are trustworthy, but because of the previous experiences with other parents.…”

“…For example, teachers receiving new students in their school may have confidence that parents will work with them to the end, not because they know those parents are trustworthy, but because of the previous experiences with other parents. The differences in the degrees of propensity to trust are directly related to differences in subsequent trust levels (Van Maele and Van Houtte, 2015;Amemiya et al, 2020).…”

“…It has been studied across numerous disciplines (anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology) with diverse associated aspects and concepts. In home-school contexts, trust has been examined alongside other variables such as schooling outcomes (Adams and Christenson, 2000;Bower et al, 2011;Adams and Forsyth, 2013;Adams, 2014;Romero, 2015;Kwan, 2016;Musah et al, 2018), communication andpartnership (Tschannen-Moran, 2001;Kikas et al, 2011;Eng et al, 2014;Li et al, 2016;Santiago et al, 2016;Houri et al, 2019), job satisfaction (Van Houtte, 2006;Khany and Tazik, 2015), professional effectiveness (Moye et al, 2005;Lee et al, 2011;Choong et al, 2019;Schwabsky et al, 2019), classroom management (Gregory and Ripski, 2010;Amemiya et al, 2020), organizational culture and behavior (Smith et al, 2001;Hoy and Tarter, 2004;Hoy et al, 2006a;Yeager et al, 2017;Farnsworth et al, 2019), leadership (Zayim and Kondakci, 2014;Freire and Fernandes, 2015;Louis and Murphy, 2017;Yin and Zheng, 2018;Farnsworth et al, 2019;Karacabey et al, 2020), and psychological constructs (Rotenberg et al, 2004;Nam and Chang, 2018) among other variables. Demographic characteristics such as socioeconomic status (Goddard et al, 2009;Janssen et al, 2012), ethnicity…”

Adolescent cognition and procedural justice: Broadening the impact of research findings on policy and practice

“…School resource officers are not the only aspects of schools that can affect adolescents' orientation to law. The trust that teachers build with students, taken together with students' trust in the broader school institution, can lead adolescents to become more positively engaged after receiving a disciplinary response (Amemiya, Fine, & Wang, ). Further, teacher fairness has been tied to adolescents' political understanding and community engagement (Claes, Hooghe, & Stolle, ).…”