Evaluating the Student-Teacher Relationship in Elementary Schools: “My Teacher & I-Child”

Empirical evidence from national and international studies suggests that the teacher-student relationship has a great impact on students’ academic success, and social and psychological wellbeing. Realizing the importance of this impact, the present study has two main purposes: firstly, to investigate the perceptions of 6–11 year old students in elementary schools in terms of the informational support, emotional support and closeness they receive based on grade level and the demographic characteristics of teachers and students; and secondly, to conduct an adaptation, validity and reliability study of an instrument which can be used in Turkey to investigate STR from the children’s perspective of perceived social support. The data was obtained from 338 students. CFA, One-Way ANOVA, Independent Samples t-Tests and Chi-Square tests were employed for the data analysis. According to the results, overall there is no significant difference in students’ perceptions based on the grade levels and students’ or teachers’ gender; however, there are differences among grades on the bases of some scale items in emotional support, informational support and closeness sub-dimensions. Additionally, the CFA revealed that the adapted My Teacher and I-Child Scale’s χ2/df, RMSEA, RMR, SRMR, GFI, and AGFI values are perfectly consistent