The Role of Parent, Classmate, and Teacher Support in Student Engagement: Evidence from Ghana

Background: The empirical literature is unequivocal about the importance of improving academic engagement through addressing challenges such as school attendance, drop out, and increasing student motivation. Less is known about how social support systems (e.g., parents, teachers, and classmates) influence students’ emotional and behavioral engagement in schools, especially in low-resource countries. This study draws from the ecological perspective and applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the potential mediated and unmediated pathways through which parent, teacher, and classmate support shape Ghanaian students’ emotional and behavioral engagement.

Methods: Data for the study come from a 2014 project in Ghana that aimed at testing the impact of different financial assistance mechanisms on the learning outcomes of low-income youth (n=135). Most the sample were girls (55%) and the average age was 16 years (standard deviation= 1.81). We conducted SEM to examine the direct and indirect associations between family economic hardship and behavioral engagement in school. We utilized Mplus 7 with the means and variance adjusted weighted least squares (WLSMV) estimation method to accommodate ordinal-level manifest variables and nonnormal data.

Findings: Results show that although parental support is the only support system with a direct predictive influence on behavioral engagement (β = .21, SE = .02, p < .001), classmate support has the strongest indirect association with students’ behavioral engagement, through the intervening role of emotional engagement (Sobel indirect effect: β = .66, SE = .07, p < .001). In this sample of Ghanaian Junior high school students, teacher support is neither a mediator nor a direct predictor of students’ emotional and behavioral engagement in school.

Conclusion/Implication: This study incorporated a strengths-based approach for examining student engagement among junior high students in Ghana. The finding on classmate support implies that students may benefit from initiatives that encourage school administrators to facilitate the formation of afterschool support groups where peer tutors can help classmates. In such an intentional environment, peer-tutors might be able to share explanations of materials and concepts in the easiest-to-understand language possible. Moreover, peer-tutoring arrangements may reduce the propensity for social alienation, as students can make friends within an environment in which people show concern for their academic advancement.