The Impact of Teacher-Student Relationships and Achievement Motivation on Students’ Intentions to Dropout According to Socio-economic Status

The main goal was to test if teacher-student relationships and achievement motivation are predicting dropout intention equally for low and high socio-economic status students. A questionnaire measuring teacher-student relationships and achievement motivation was administered to 2,360 French Canadian secondary students between 12 and 15 years old during the spring of 2005. A hierarchical multiple regressions model with interactions predicted their dropout intention. The moderator variable was SES (socio-economic status). Results showed that most predictors of dropout intention acted similarly for both SES. However, strong competence beliefs in mathematics predicted low dropout intention for students from high SES. Knowing that low SES students dropout more than others, our homogeneous predictors do not explain entirely the dropout phenomenon.