Teacher commitment a mediator to teachers’ caring behaviour

Abstract

Caring teachers play pertinent roles in instilling good values and harnessing efforts toward elevating meaningful relationships with students. Teacher Commitment (TC), a pertinent factor in effective teaching, strongly enhances students’ learning, yet it is under-researched, as a mediator to Teachers’ Caring Behaviour (TCB), especially in an Asian context. This study examines TC as a mediator between TCB and four exogeneous variables Modelling, Teacher-students interactions (TSI), Pedagogical Caring (PC) and Teacher’s Dispositions (TD). The survey instrument was administered to 469 fourth and fifth formers of six Malaysian secondary schools where variance-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the responses. The results demonstrated TC significantly mediates modelling, TSI, PC and TD with TCB. It also displayed that PC is the most significant and has the highest effect size in the direct relationship. The study unveils TC plays an important mediating role between modelling, TSI, PC, TD and TCB for students to be motivated to study and excel academically, besides contributing to the welfare of the students. This implies TC has a beneficial impact on students’ learning and well-being.

Keywords

• Teacher commitment
• teacher caring behaviour
• teacher-students interactions
• modelling
• teachers’ dispositions
• pedagogical caring