Closeness, communication, and motivation in argentine technical secondary education: a comparative study between a public and a private school

In a context of expanding private provision within Argentine technical secondary education, understanding how educational context relates to teacher–student relationships is relevant. This study examined students’ perceptions of teacher–student relationships, classroom climate, and motivational orientations across two technical schools (one public and one private, each representative of its educational context) and basic and upper cycles. It also analysed associations between relational and classroom-climate variables and motivational orientations. Upper-cycle students were expected to report a more favourable relational and classroom-climate profile, and we examined whether this pattern differed between school contexts. Participants were 459 students aged 13–18 years (private school, n = 93; public school, n = 366). A cross-sectional, ex post facto design used 2 × 2 factorial MANOVA, mixed repeated-measures ANOVA, and multiple regression. Upper-cycle students generally reported a more favourable relational and classroom-climate profile, but this pattern varied across school contexts. In the private school, upper-cycle students reported more favourable perceptions across several dimensions than basic-cycle students, whereas this pattern was not consistently observed in the public school. Motivational orientations also varied by school and cycle, with higher learning orientation and lower avoidance among private-school upper-cycle students. Teacher closeness showed the most consistent independent association with motivational orientations, particularly learning orientation, although regression models had modest explanatory capacity. These findings suggest that the more favourable profile expected in the upper cycle is not inherent to technical specialisation but may vary according to the organisational and pedagogical conditions of each educational context. This highlights the need to consider how specialised training is supported to foster students’ motivation to learn.