Le lien entre les perceptions des élèves sur la relation élève-enseignant et les problèmes de comportement extériorisés

Appling pedagogical methods and transmitting programmed material is not sufficient to define the complexity of teaching. The pedagogical relationship built by the teacher with his or her students is another important and necessary component. This relationship is considered optimal when it has a high level of warmth and a low level of conflicts. Previous studies demonstrate significant links between the quality of this relationship and different indicators of school-adaptations. In general, the reports reveal that a warm student-teacher relationship has a positive impact on student behaviour, academic success as well as feelings and attitudes toward school. Furthermore, the quality of student-teacher relationship has an even greater effect on students considered at risk. This student category is characterised by the presence of vulnerability factors such as poverty (social factors), difficult parent-child relationship (family factors) or a lack of social skills (individual factors). Majority of research done on student-teacher relationship does not specify which aspects in particular have a significant influence on its overall quality. In order to address this issue, two goals are aimed by the present study: 1) examine the relationship between perceptions of high school students considered at risk for various aspects of the quality of the student-teacher relationship and externalizing behavior problems; 2) verification if this link evolves over time. In our work, the type of student-teacher relationship is categorized by two dimensions: the warmth and the conflicts (Pianta, 1992). The classification according to the positive or negative pole of each dimension enables to distinguish between four types of relations the student is prone to establish with his or her teachers: either warm, controversial, negligent or conflict. A random sample of the data collected in 2002-2008 during the evaluation of intervention strategy Agir Autrement (Act Differently) (SIAA) is used in the present longitudinal study. It is composed of 563 high school students: 273 girls and 290 boys. V Secondary analyses are made on the data collected on the same students during their first and fifth year. This approach gives the opportunity to observe the changes in student behaviour as function of student-teacher relationship quality. In general, our results show a high complexity of links between different types of student-teacher relationship and the exteriorized behaviour problems. More specifically, we conclude that a warm type relation is less likely to be associated with exteriorized behaviour problems of students at risk, and that as much in 1st year of high school as in the 5th. According to our results, conflict and controversial relationship types are significantly linked to exteriorized behaviour problems of students at risk in the 1st and the 5th year of high school. In the case of the negligent relationship, the results demonstrate the existence of a correlation between this bond type and exteriorized behaviour problems. However, the strength of this correlation is higher for the students at risk in the 5th year of high school as compared to the same students when they were in their 1st year. Finally, when all the results are taken together, they reveal the relative stability of the relationship type over time and on the other hand, a significant increase in the frequency of problematic behaviour such as serious stealing and psychotropic consumption. Furthermore, the obtained results show the existence of a link between the conflict dimension of the student-teacher relationship and the psychotropic consumption of students accounted by our sample. The present study demonstrates that since conflicts act as risk factors capable of increasing the frequency of exteriorized behaviour problems of high school students considered at risk, the conflict dimension is equally important in the student-teacher relationship as the warmth dimension. A relationship between students and their teachers with a reduced level of conflicts can play an important role in the prevention of this type of problems experienced by high school students.

Keyphrases: relations interpersonnelles, attachement, student-teacher relationship, student-teacher relationship quality, interpersonal relations, attachment, student at risk, exteriorized behaviour problems