Previous research suggests a connection between teacher-student relationship quality, relatedness and student engagement and achievement. However, methodological limitations present in extant research reduce the confidence we can place in the results from previous studies. Specifically, these limitations include single raters of relationship quality which leads to possible shared methods variance, cross-sectional data gathering, and failing to account for the nested nature of classroom data. This study addressed these concerns by gathering data from 2nd through 6th grade students and their teachers across two school years while using multi-level modeling to control for classroom differences and student change across time. The purpose of this study is to use these more conservative methods to examine the unique contributions of relationship quality and relatedness for student engagement and achievement. We also extend previous research by including the sex of teacher as a covariate of relationship quality, engagement and achievement. As expected we found that variables of relationship quality predicted student engagement. Importantly, these associations remained significant even when teacher and student reports were compared. Teacher-rated engagement also predicted achievement. Unexpectedly, there was little support for a connection between relational quality variables and achievement or for student rated engagement and student achievement. Overall, findings indicate support for theories that posit a connection between relationship quality and student engagement but our results indicate that the connection between relationship quality, engagement and achievement may not be asstrong as previous research has reported. This highlights the value of using more conservative analytical methods to determine the confidence we can place in the correlations between teacher-student relationship quality, relatedness to teacher, student engagement and student achievement.
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