Teacher psychological maltreatment and students' school -related functioning

The deleterious effects of parental psychological maltreatment on children have been well documented; however, to date reports on the frequency and correlates of teacher psychological maltreatment exist only in clinical work and unpublished data. This study assessed the prevalence of teacher psychological maltreatment (both psychological abuse and neglect) and examined the relationship between teacher psychological maltreatment and various measures of student school-related adjustment. A further purpose of the study was the creation of a teacher psychological maltreatment measure, an author developed and carefully piloted instrument with high internal consistency reliability (alpha = .92). Seven hundred 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students from a lower middle-class, urban school district in the Northeast participated in the study. Students were asked to report exclusively on their relationship with a teacher of a target subject (English, math, history) and their performance and engagement in that class. Nearly two-thirds of students (67.5%) reported at least one incident of teacher psychological abuse since the beginning of the school year. Over three-quarters of the sample (78.9%) experienced some type of emotional or cognitive neglect from the target teacher. Significantly more boys than girls reported being the recipient of teacher psychological abuse; however, no gender differences were obtained for neglect. Although a large proportion of students reported at least one occurrence of verbal or symbolic abuse from teachers, the frequency of these events was relatively low; over 55% of the sample reported fewer than three incidents since the beginning of the year. Teacher psychological abuse was found to be the strongest predictor of student self-reported psychological and physical aggression toward the teacher in a model that included students' level of global aggression and parental psychological maltreatment. Teacher neglect was not related to students' reports of verbal or physical aggression toward teachers. Both teacher psychological abuse and neglect were significant predictors of students' academic self-esteem and efficacy beliefs related to the target class. Finally, teacher psychological abuse and neglect were found to be negatively related to students' level of emotional and behavioral engagement in the target class and their valuation of the subject matter.