Teachers are entrusted with great hopes and expectations from schools and parents, especially concerning child academic outcomes. However, focusing solely on teachers' pedagogy doesn't fully capture the complete spectrum of educational processes that are beneficial for a student's academic achievement. This study considers teachers' motivational beliefs (i.e., self-efficacy and sense of responsibility), their relationships with student outcomes (i.e., subject-specific interest, self-efficacy, post-secondary aspirations), and their sense of support (i.e., teachers' expectations, professional learning community, and principal support) as supplemental drivers for student academic achievement. Some notable findings from the study reveal that (a) math teachers' self-efficacy correlates positively with students' interest in math; (b) math teachers' self-efficacy mediates the relationships between teachers' sense of support and students' subject-specific self-efficacy, and (c) teachers' motivational beliefs do not predict students' aspirations for higher education. These findings offer implications for understanding the various ways high school teachers are influenced by the school ecosystem, and how this may be related to students' academic development. Further results, implications, and future directions are discussed.
Zilin Zhu (Sat,) studied this question.