4.Studies of correlation between student engagement and teacher personality. The amount of time students allocate to learning activities was the first definition of student engagement in its infant stage (Brophy, 1983; Fisher et al., 1980; McIntyre et al.,1983). Although student engagement has long been solely associated with students; involvement in educational processes, the new perspective on the term’s definition also includes cognitive and affective components. Astin (1984) referred to student engagement as «the amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience», and highlighted that for an effort to be considered as engagement along with investing time, students must actively invest in intellectual capacities and their attention. In general, researchers (Kuh, 2003; Handelsman et al., 2005; Chapman, 2003) seem to concur on three major components in defining student engagement, which are cognitive, affective and behavioral efforts put by the students. Talking separately about each of these aspects, according to Chapman (2003) cognitive criteria indicates the focus devoted and the mental involvement when doing the tasks, second behavioral criteria indicates contributed responses to the offered tasks, third, affective criteria indicates the students’ investment level in the task and their emotional reactions to those tasks.
There are visible behavior patterns that assess student engagement possible. Franklin (2005) described some of these patterns as students’ «tendency to listen, respond to questions, collaborate with peers, and actively participate in class.» Mentioned behavior models are likely to indicate student engagement in the classroom when monitoring. Not surprisingly, a high level of engagement is linked to high-quality learning outcomes (Krause & Coates, 2008).
The research conducted by Kiefer and Pennington (2017) intended to find out if there is a correlation between teachers perceived as supporters of autonomous learning and the engagement level that students show. The researchers concluded that not only teachers influence but «directly shapes» student engagement, and is crucial when examining the perspectives of school students. Cinches et al., (2017) highlighted the impossibility of accurate student engagement studies without counting the teacher’s impact.
Another study on teacher support and students’ well-being, conducted by Suldo et al. (2009), intended to explore the relationship between teacher support and student success, revealing that supportive teacher-student interaction is likely to result in students’ academic engagement. Apart from studies on the significance of teacher-student relationships, there is more research on factors that influence these relationships. Aiming to get a deeper understanding of the factors that matter in teacher-learner interactions, Split et al., (2012) surveyed 657 students. They revealed that a lack of good relationship between educators and their learners causes student anxiety and insecurity which intervenes their social and educational growth. In a Zepke et al., (2010) survey, where 1200 students took part, it was identified that 4 of the 10 factors that enhance student engagement were directly connected to teacher-learner relationships, and in fact, supportive teacher behavior plays a crucial role in building positive teacher-student relationships.
