Measuring teacher connectedness in adolescence: a review of existing measures

Funding acknowledgement: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 657482 Measuring teacher connectedness in adolescence. A review of existing measures Irene García-Moya, Frances Bunn, Antonia Jiménez-Iglesias, Carmen Paniagua, & Fiona Brooks Connectedness in the school seems to be an important asset for young people´s wellbeing. However, recent research suggests that school connectedness is a multidimensional construct. Therefore, it is advisable to unpack the global concept of school connectedness and examine its main components separately, including teacher connectedness. As part of the EU funded Teacher Connectedness Project “Wellbeing among European youth: The contribution of student-teacher relationships in the secondary-school population”, we conducted a scoping review of the literature aimed to map current state of understanding and research relating to school and teacher connectedness, including the way in which these constructs have been operationalized in existing measures. Using the free terms connectedness, teacher and school as keywords, we searched SCOPUS, Web of Science, ERIC, the Cochrane Library and the EPPI Centre Database of Education Research for relevant peer-review articles published in English from 1990 to 2016. From the initial set of 1,750 potentially relevant identified records, 350 papers were selected for the review. Twenty of those studies either developed or examined the psychometric properties of measures assessing school or teacher connectedness. Based on them, this poster summarizes available measures for the assessment of teacher connectedness. Seven out of the ten main measures identified in this review allowed for some separate assessment of teacher connectedness or closely-related constructs. The operationalization of teacher connectedness in these measures tended to consistently include certain elements (care, support, etc.) but the extent to which other aspects were covered greatly varied across measures. Finally, we identified some differences in the way in which items were phrased which may deserve further attention. How to cite this: García-Moya, I., Bunn,F., Jiménez-Iglesias, A., Paniagua, C., & Brooks, F. (2017). Measuring teacher connectedness in adolescence. A review of existing measures. HBSC International Spring Meeting. Bergen (Norway), 19-21 June 2017.