Abstract
In urban secondary schools where underpreparation and dropping out are real world concerns, students understand that their relationships with teachers affect their learning. Using descriptive coding and thematic analysis of focus group data, we explore adolescents’ perceptions of the bridges that foster and the barriers that inhibit supportive relationships with teachers, and the boundary expectations that function as both. The characteristics of supportive student–teacher relationships identified by youth participants suggest a number of teacher practices capable of meeting adolescents’ developmental needs and, as such, are likely to positively influence adolescents’ developmental and academic trajectories.
Vulnerable youth, both those disadvantaged due to historical (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities) and socioeconomic (e.g., those from low income, low parental education households) factors, face a number of economic and sociopolitical risk factors, such as underfunded schools and the exclusion of their families from decision-making processes related to educational quality (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Ultimately, these risks can culminate in lower academic achievement and increase risk for dropping out (Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004). Dropping out of high school is theoretically understood to be a process rather than a discrete event (Finn, 1989; Hernandez Jozefowicz-Simbeni, 2008).
In an attempt to understand the multiple processes that can lead to school withdrawal or failure, many researchers have sought to understand the underlying processes that lead up to early school leaving (Finn & Owings, 2006). Feelings of not fitting in can lead to distraction (Crosnoe, 2011); this distraction can lead to disengagement from school-based tasks (Connell & Wellborn, 1991). On the other hand, identification with school, fostered through sustained and multilevel participation, can connect youth to school in ways that are thought to prevent early school leaving (Finn, 1989). Therefore, preventing early school leaving and encouraging positive youth outcomes appears to depend on both positive relationships with school-based peers and adults and a commitment to school (for intervention evidence of such see Catalano, Haggerty, Oesterle, Fleming, & Hawkins, 2004).
Further evidence of these two separate school connection components, relationships with teachers and participation/identification with school, is found through recent factor analytic investigations of school connection measures. For example, McNeely (2005) found school connectedness to be comprised of two distinct factors—perceptions of the quality of teacher relationships and a more general sense of school belonging. When tested, the predictive power of the teacher relationships factor was a significantly stronger predictor of youth outcomes (McNeely, 2005).
Additional support for the critical importance of student–teacher relationships to subsequent academic achievement is derived from a variety of sources. For example, analyzing National Educational Longitudinal Study data, Wimberly (2002) determined three school relationship characteristics—School Personnel Expectations, Teachers Talking with Students, and Extracurricular Participation—were particularly salient factors for African American students relative to later educational achievement. Likewise, using a comprehensive change model to examine a dataset of approximately 600,000 students in Texas public schools, Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain (2005) determined a one standard deviation increase in teacher quality had significant effects on student achievement in both reading and mathematics.
We know that relationships matter, but it is also important to critically examine the romanticized notion of “supportive relationships.” For example, distinctions between aesthetic care, sentimental phrases with little to no action, and authentic care, actions that incorporate genuine consideration of the person being cared for and their capacities, are critical (Toshalis, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999). Current theories and measures for understanding teacher relationships tend to focus on the responsiveness of a teacher during a single observational period (see for example Hamre & Pianta, 2010). These data provide some important information of student–teacher relationships, but may lack an understanding of the history and context within the specific classroom. Moreover, these adult-centric observational approaches overlook adolescents’ unique and personal experience of school.
In order to guide educators on how to translate the slogan “relationships matter” into preservice training, professional development and/or the evaluation of effective teaching, a research-based theory of the interaction-specific processes is needed. Fortunately, previous literature provides a set of thoughtful qualitative inquiries reviewed below. The foundation for such work focuses on three key components of a high school experience: instruction, classroom management, and postgraduation planning.
This study aims to contribute to this important line of research by identifying in our data those specific processes which adolescents report foster positive student–teacher relationships, referred to as bridges, as well as those processes which hinder the development of such relationships, referred to as barriers. By examining previous works regarding perceived support among ethnically diverse urban youth (Ozer, Wolf, & Kong, 2008), culturally responsive classroom management (Milner & Tenore, 2010), and school networks for support and guidance (Farmer-Hinton, 2008), we link our findings to previous research. Additionally, we use self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000), to explain why certain teacher practices are identified by youth as particularly powerful. Self-determination theory highlights the role of needs fulfillment within relationships as well as the ongoing self-evaluative processes likely to determine whether a positive student–teacher relationship will translate into positive outcomes, such as academic achievement, for a student. In light of our findings and the confirmation and extension of previous findings provided, we offer action-oriented suggestions for increasing the quality of student–teacher relationships.
Engagement Processes Activated Through Interpersonal Structures
All humans have a fundamental drive to satisfy the basic need to belong through persistent, positive, caring relationships (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Contextual conditions outside the domain of school such as family economic risk or neighborhood risk can influence an adolescent’s ability to “hang in” and develop school-based relationships able to satisfy belonging and relatedness needs (Connell, Halpem-Fisher, Clifford, Crichlow, & Usinger, 1995). For some youth, however, simply hanging in there may not be enough.
Youth are continually assessing how they believe others in their environment to perceive them, and in some cases, school-based adults intensify what Spencer (1999, 2006) describes as the patterns of interpretations of these self-appraisals, which link to experienced stress on the part of the adolescent. Within classrooms, teachers form expectations of their students often focused on anticipated achievement (Brophy, 1983; Davis, 2003). Differential teacher expectations can have negative consequences for students for the fact that students’ awareness of these differentials result in varying student behavior (Brattesani, Weinstein, & Marshall, 1984; Kuklinski & Weinstein, 2000; Weinstein, 1983).
Though many teacher assessments may be both appropriate and accurate (Brophy, 1983), it remains that many may not be. These faulty expectations may instead be based on faulty assessments, counterproductive interaction patterns that the student learned from previous bad relationships with teachers (Davis, 2006), or even be influenced by race or ethnicity (McKown & Weinstein, 2008). Whatever their origin, and to an extent even their accuracy, when these expectations result in the teacher treating the students differently, it can have unfortunate consequences, such as the increased risk of lowered achievement of those students who do not receive the support that they perceive that their peers receive, particularly when the students themselves are attuned to these differences in treatment (Brattesani et al., 1984; Kuklinski & Weinstein, 2000; McKown & Weinstein, 2008).
In the classroom, a student’s relationship with the teacher can foster academic value systems, sustain long-term engagement, and inform enduring self-appraisals the student will form of him or herself as learner (Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, & Ryan, 1991). Students experiencing anxiety, apprehension or alienation as a result of perceived negativity of classroom climate or negative student–teacher relationships may be discouraged from any subsequent attempts to form interpersonal bonds with the teacher (Bernstein-Yamashiro, 2004) or future academic tasks (Connell et al., 1995).
Self-Determination Theory
By offering a roadmap to the interplay between some of the major human drives fulfilled through relationships and cognitive/affective processes, self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) provides a model of how an individual student’s reading of the relational climate of a classroom can lead a student to engage, disengage, or reengage in the learning context. The basic needs component of self-determination theory suggests that humans are driven to satiate three innate needs; these are the need for (a) autonomy, or a sense of personal control and direction; (b) competence, or a sense of efficacy within a context; and (c) relatedness, or quality interpersonal connection (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Reeve, 2012; Ryan & Deci, 2000). According to basic needs theory, different levels of engagement across an environment are due to the fact that psychological and developmental needs are fulfilled to varying degrees, depending upon context-specific factors. In a classroom, for example, students disengage or engage in a manner intended to prompt a change within the environment.
In the context of student–teacher relationship formation, a student determines whether or not to continue to invest in a relationship with a teacher based on these evaluations. For example, a student–teacher relationship which provides a student access to resources needed to successfully reach academic goals, and thus supports feelings of competence, would likely be pursued. On the other hand, a relationship in which feelings of incompetence are communicated would likely be dissolved. By considering the drive to form and sustain interpersonal connections to others within a shared context, we can begin to understand how a student decides whether to engage with or disengage from a classroom environment. Therefore, we focus on the concept of relatedness.
The basic human need to form interpersonal connections
Feelings of relatedness within a given environment have tremendous potential to impact an individual’s response to that environment. The concept of relatedness describes an interpersonal connection within a given social context that is perceived as secure and satisfying (Deci et al., 1991). Relatedness, therefore, plays an essential role in fostering engagement, especially when initial intrinsic, or innate, motivation is low or lacking. When the need for relatedness is being met through the student and teacher working together to construct a positive student–teacher relationship, external motivations for the aspects of the learning context that are not intrinsically motivating can be internalized, which in turn prompts engagement (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009). This can foster task persistence, or continued engagement, and increase the chance of reengagement in challenging academic tasks leading to greater appreciation and even eventual internalization of external values (Reeve, 2012; Ryan & Deci, 2000).
Empirical support for such claims comes from several recent studies. One study examining these processes in two different samples, one consisting of elementary students and the other of college students, found that both intrinsic motivation and internalized external motivation predicted academic achievement (Burton, Lydon, D’Alessandro, & Koestner, 2006). Likewise, relatedness between students and their teachers has been demonstrated to predict students’ emotional and behavioral engagement (see for example Skinner & Belmont, 1993). Additionally, the provision of emotional support, a hallmark of feelings of relatedness, helps to sustain a students’ engagement in the face of difficulties and adversity (Connell & Wellborn, 1991).
Conversely, when these needs are not being met, students may rightfully resist environments perceived as negative; this behavior is often misunderstood by adults as defiance (Nakkula & Toshalis, 2006). Self-determination theory recasts this rightful resistance as a behavioral communication of an outstanding need. For example, a student may avoid attending or “ditch” a class in which he or she feels “judged” or “stereotyped” by the teacher.
Careful attention to how students and teachers negotiate relationships through a series of mutually determined understandings of the language they use, the power each wields, and the behaviors they engage in (Davis, 2003; Meyer & Turner, 2006) restructures student–teacher relationships as a collaboratively constructed cooperative understanding. Each person in a relationship holds a unique perspective and assessment of the relationship (Davis, 2003). Dyadic interpersonal relationships constantly evolve as the two people negotiate and renegotiate, evaluate and reevaluate their roles, their feelings toward each other, and how they want their relationship to unfold (Davis, 2006; Kennedy, 2011). Such relationships are naturally complex, and consist of many different features and processes. Student–teacher relationships are no exception.
This Study
This study explores the manner in which urban youth make meaning of their interactions with their teachers in both a concrete way, reflecting on their lived experiences, and in a hypothetical, idealized way. Grounded within the data and working from an emergent perspective, iterative data analysis guided the development of our research questions:
What do adolescents perceive as typical of their interactions with their teachers?
What do adolescents believe should and should not be typical of their interpersonal interactions with their teachers?
What do adolescents report their teachers should know more about, and how do they feel that teachers should gather this information?
Design and Method
We collected focus group data (N = 13) at three urban sites across the United States using an open-ended protocol. We employed descriptive coding to explore emergent themes regarding student–teacher interactions to illuminate a fuller understanding of adolescents’ perceptions of their classroom experiences and their appreciations of these interactions.
Participants and Data Collection Procedures
Focus group data were collected in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (3 sites, 7 focus groups), Minneapolis, Minnesota (1 site, 3 focus groups) and Los Angeles, California (1 site, 3 focus groups). Researchers recruited study participants (N = 78) for focus groups (average participants per group = 6) primarily through after-school and community programs. In Pennsylvania, the protocol was first developed with a convenience pilot sample of university freshmen (n = 6); the second site was youth (n = 12) in a school-based after-school program aimed at promoting youth leadership; the third site was youth (n = 25) in a community-based program (as were the groups in both California, n = 22, and Minnesota, n =13). The coinvestigators of the study had working relationships with the school-based and community-based recruitment sites, but did not have prior relationships with youth participants. Program personnel conducted the recruitment by mentioning the focus group opportunity to program youth at a number of self-selected sites one week in advance to the focus group date. During the focus groups, participants were compensated with a catered meal. Parents of participants under the age of 18 provide consent for their children to participate in the research prior to the focus group sessions, and verbal assent was obtained before focus groups began in accordance with the primary site’s IRB.
Participants ranged in age from 14 to 20 years of age (M = 16.92, SD = 1.30 years). The adolescents sampled represented a diverse racial composition, with 39.7% reporting as Black/African American, 23.1% as Asian/Asian American, 16.7% as White/Euro-American, 3.9% as American Indian, and 5.1% as multiracial (11.5% of participants did not report racial identification information); additionally, 19.2% self-identified as Hispanic. Regarding gender, 34.6% self-identified as female and 65.4% as male; though provided the opportunity, no participants self-identified as transgender or nongendered.
Instead of asking youth to report parental occupation or income directly, we used three items from the internationally validated Family Affluence Scale (FAS II; Boyce, Torsheim, Currie, & Zambon, 2006). This decision reflects our desire to avoid poor answering rates associated with traditional socioeconomic status questions such as soliciting parental occupation (Molcho, Gabhainn, & Kelleher, 2007; Wardle, Robb, & Johnson, 2002) and maintain the possibility for cross-cultural comparison studies. An example FAS II item includes, “How many cars, trucks, or vans does your family own?” Our focus group sample’s mean score of 3.71 (SD = 1.29), on a scale from zero to six, indicates a sample of high-midrange family affluence within a global context. Considered in the context of U.S. standards, however, this is a midaffluence sample.
Following a flexible protocol, facilitators guided youth participants through two hands-on activities and multiple open-ended questions. The first of these activities asked participants to indicate how much they felt unspecified adults in their lives knew about them by physically standing on a continuum line with the two ends representing the extremes knows nothing about me and knows everything. Then, on the same continuum line, participants indicated how much they felt the school-based adults in their lives knew. The reasoning for where they stood at both times was discussed, as were any position changes. Next, participants answered several open-ended questions aimed at gathering information about their interpersonal relationships with school-based adults. At one point, participants designated which aspects of themselves (via manipulable cards reading “Likes & Dislikes,” “Goals,” “Interests” and “Feelings” as prompts) they shared and did not share with teachers and other school-based adults. Facilitators also asked the participants about times that they felt understood or misunderstood by their teachers. Finally, moderators asked participants to pretend that they were teacher educators, and to explain what teachers needed to know about them as students and how to go about getting such information. Digital recorders captured the dialogue during all focus group sessions, and the resultant de-identified transcripts constitute our qualitative data set.
Coding Procedures and Data Analyses
Using the NVivo 9 software package (for review, see Bazeley, 2010), we descriptively micro-coded (units as small as phrases in a sentence, to full conversations) data and examined how frequently different codes occurred simultaneously to identify patterns and themes. Examining code co-occurrences between our structural codes and our content codes provided a multifaceted understanding of what the adolescent participants perceived as occurring in their student–teacher interactions, as well as provided insight into the likely implications of these relational assessments made by the adolescents. One challenge to a focus group method, however, is that topics may be abandoned and revisited multiple times within a relatively short span of time. Multiple processes were frequently discussed simultaneously by participants because (a) the participant reported experiencing them simultaneously; (b) the participant believed them to be interrelated in regards to a specific experience; or (c) the participant compared and contrasted dissimilar processes for instructive purposes. As a result, codes occasionally overlapped in unintentional ways. Therefore, to confirm the validity of our analyses, we manually verified all relevant coding co-occurrences. This instance-by-instance verification ensures that all counts of codes co-occurrences are accurate and did not occur simply as artifacts of multiple sets of codes overlapping within the same one-paragraph coding unit. Throughout this coding process, we utilized three distinct types of codes: Mechanical codes, Conceptual codes, and Structural codes (see appendix for an excerpt of our codebook). In the following paragraphs, we provide a brief overview of each distinct type of code.
Mechanical codes designated functional features of the focus group data such as the specific speaker (moderator, participant, or other), the specific actors referenced in any story or example provided by a youth participant (a student–teacher interaction, a youth–parent interaction, etc.), and which particular protocol item participants were discussing (continuum of opinion, identity cards, teacher educator, etc.). The mechanical codes facilitated data reduction (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Namey, Guest, Thairu, & Johnson, 2008). By selecting only data which referred to teacher–student interactions or regarded teacher-specific items of the protocol such as those reviewed above, we generated a succinct, focused dataset with which to explore our emergent research questions (Schutt, 2006).
Conceptual codes consisted of emergent and literature-based concepts. We created conceptual codes through an iterative, cooperative process after multiple readings of several transcripts (Booth, Colomb, & Williams, 2008). These emergent codes allowed us to identify salient, repeated themes and concepts within the data, and form the heart of our analyses, as they represent the content of the adolescents’ perceptions. Prior to independent coding, raters read and coded one transcript, compared the density of coding stripes (Bazeley, 2010), and calculated interrater reliability scores (Viera & Garrett, 2005) in order to ensure coding fidelity (Namey et al., 2008). To ensure that our codes were not redundant and had thematic unity, we examined the convergence and divergence of conceptually similar codes, and collapsed multiple codes into one, or split one code into multiples, as necessary. We also employed a few literature-generated codes specifically related to features of supportive relationships.
The final type of codes used, Structural codes (Guest & McLellan, 2003; Saldaña, 2009), designated when participants expressed hypothetical social expectations or real observed social behaviors of teachers. This last set of classifications became especially important when organizing data relevant to the research questions. While conceptual codes explained the content of the data, structural codes designated whether or not the adolescent’s story or example described something that the teacher did or did not do. Additionally, the structural codes reflected the adolescents’ judgments and values of the story relayed, as to whether they felt it should or should not happen. Because applying the structural codes involved a subjective process of interpreting data, two or more researchers conducted this process collaboratively to reach a consensus of interpretation.
This type of coding deliberately labeled the perceived effect of the interaction on the closeness of the interpersonal relationship. As such, we were able to explore the driving question in this coding process, “Did the interaction bridge the two people to bring them closer together, or did it separate them or create a barrier between closeness developing?” Finally, by examining the thematic patterns identified, we gained a full understanding of the processes that the participants related to us.
Findings and Discussion
During focus group sessions, participants drew on both personal experiences as well as reported or witnessed experiences of others to describe real and idealized student–teacher relationships. These stories of interaction took on a range of forms—some were narrative stories of remembered events, while others were broad, generalized descriptions of the nature of events or relationships in school. Students provided rich information about what they wanted from teachers, both instructionally and interpersonally, and shared important insights into how teachers may be better able to meet their students’ needs. This data gives us insight into both how students make sense of their own and others’ interactions with teachers and also how interactional experiences shape students’ generalizations about how “things are” between students and teachers. Finally, our participants demonstrated engagement with ongoing self-evaluative processes that provided assessments of the degree to which school-based adults met their psychological and developmental needs.
Students spoke of the desire to collaboratively construct relationships with teachers within distinct interpersonal boundaries. The need for teachers to build appropriate and supportive relationships in which students felt known, cared for, and understood existed simultaneously with the desire for teachers to detect and uphold student-identified interpersonal boundaries. To make sense of the complex features of student–teacher interpersonal relationships, we will first discuss the student-reported bridges to supportive student–teacher relationships. Next, we will address the barriers students described that serve, with one notable exception, to stand in the way of positive student–teacher relationships. In each section, student participants’ practical recommendations regarding how to strengthen student–teacher relationships in high school are discussed.
Building Bridges to Make Meaningful Connections
Bridges, one major thematic category in our data, consist of those interactions which foster positive relationship development, or bring students and teachers closer interpersonally. The most commonly discussed bridge was effortful engagement, an instance in which one person actively and deliberately engages another on an interpersonal level. A similar concept to Gottman and DeClaires’s idea of bidding, “any single expression that says ‘I want to feel connected to you’” (2001, p. 4), one student provided the example of a time when she was struggling socially in school, and a teacher noticed her distress:
[The teacher] noticed . . . it’s hard to notice from someone like me because I don’t really like to talk about it . . . She didn’t know what was going on . . . She thought I was just a good student in school and not worrying about anything at home and stuff. When I told her my problems, I felt like she knew me, because she told me . . . “It’s going to be okay.” (Female CA1)
In this example, the student remembered the impression that her teacher made when she took the time to pull her aside and ask how she was doing. When the student responded with her concerns, the teacher was encouraging and supportive. The initial question prompted their relationship to deepen, as the student replied that since they talked, she feels her teacher knows her. Without the attempt to engage the student enacted by the teacher, their relationship may have remained more distant, the teacher believing this quiet student to have no troubles while the student believing her teacher did not genuinely care about her well-being.
Due to students’ frequent inability to perceive care without effort, teachers’ effortful engagement provided students with information about teachers’ commitment to students’ well-being. These perceptions, then, informed the student as to whether or not the teacher is fulfilling the student’s need for relatedness. The fulfillment of these relatedness needs are theorized to affect students’ assessment of whether or not to engage in the learning environment (Connell & Wellborn, 1991).
Participants spoke clearly about the importance and value of teachers’ efforts to reach out and connect with them. One female student succinctly stated, “The ones that do know you, care more.” Another adolescent stated his experience with teachers:
Teachers are just interested in your learning . . . if you’re just sitting there not doing nothing. Some teachers will just call to you and tell you, “Hey, do your work.” But they’ll never ask you, “Oh, what’s wrong? Are you feeling all right? Do you need something?” (Male, CA1)
This adolescent’s statement indicated when a teacher does not take the time to inquire about what may be going on in the student’s life, the student may interpret teachers as just interested in one particular, de-contextualized aspect of a student, in this case learning. For adolescents engaged in complex identity work, answering fundamental questions about who they are and who they want to be, this “just teach” approach is unsatisfying and often leads to adolescent disengagement (Chhuon & Wallace, 2012).
As evidenced by the frequency of teacher should (a structural code) and bridging (a thematic concept) co-occurrences (n = 31), many students wished to strengthen relationships with teachers. The majority of discussions of such bridges reflected the students’ desire for these processes and interpersonal experiences to occur with greater frequency. Effortful engagement was suggested as something students thought teachers should do; however, the concept was only discussed about half as many times as something teachers already do. In fact, the desire for teachers to effortfully engage students was the most commonly discussed prescriptive concept.
A roadmap to constructing bridges
Within educational settings, forming and maintaining persistent, positive relationships in order to fulfill relatedness needs remains vital, despite numerous constraints such as large class sizes and a relentless focus on standardized testing. Youth participants described ways in which teachers could maximize the limited opportunities available for interactions with students. For example, a female described an experience of feeling understood by recounting how one of her teachers was able to connect with his students through simple, but repeated, acts of effortful engagement:
[My teacher] will ask you at least one or two questions about you and how your day is. And all you have to do is just answer within a few words and he’ll automatically know how you feel, and he’ll give you motivation and stuff, just really inspirational words and you’re like, “Oh, he understands where I’m coming from because he’s been through it.” (Female, MN2)
This student’s example illustrates the strong trend repeated frequently within our data of students’ perceptions of teachers knowing them or caring about them depending on the teacher’s willingness to approach and engage them. By asking students about their day, paying attention to student concerns, and respecting student needs, the teacher let this student know he cared. Significantly, the student identified this process of effortful engagement as “giving motivation.” Also important is the “understands where I’m coming from” portion of this adolescent’s explanation of her experience with this teacher. The establishment of commonalities between student and teacher helps to eliminates separateness between student and teacher in order to build connections (Milner, 2011).
Building stronger student–teacher relationships can take place within a predominantly instruction-focused setting. One participant, for example, described establishing connections with some of her teachers:
I got to know my teachers really well. And since I had them for two years, the same teachers, we built a relationship and they knew us, and they knew that I was focused and I wanted to get my work done. So, it was more of a relationship I would say. (Female, PA2)
In her explanation of building supportive relationships with teachers, this student attributed her success to the length of time that they knew each other. The duration of interaction, or “no end in sight” parameter, has been identified theoretically as a key characteristic of relationships able to fulfill relatedness needs (see, for example, Baumeister & Leary, 1995), but also by policy-oriented researchers who advocate for school relationship models that ensure each student has a long-term relationship with at least one school-based adult (see for example Wimberly, 2002).
Accordingly to our participants, bridge-building processes, such as effortful engagement, do not have to be time- or labor-intensive, but they must be authentic and genuine. Attention from teachers in the form of effortful engagement was often appreciated as a form of expressed caring, which acted to support relationship development. Several participants, while acknowledging the difficulty teachers might have connecting with students—especially in the face of persistent disciplinary problems or challenging academic struggles— maintained the importance of teacher’s effortful engagement in these circumstances. For example, one student said:
If a student’s grades are slipping you can call them in and talk to them or something . . . pull them out of class or something or have them stay after school and just talk… Talk about the situation. (Female, CA2)
To maintain school functioning, students in distress are in particular need of supportive relationships with teachers (Juvonen, 2006). Moreover, students living in worlds of hyper-segregation by race and class, but also in terms of educational attainment, might face particular needs in terms of social support in order to navigate discontinuity between personal experiences and the college-bound ideal promoted in high schools (Farmer-Hinton, 2008). This participant understood the critical role supportive teacher relationships play for vulnerable students.
The special role of support
Adolescents’ interpretations of strong student–teacher relationships positioned support as a critical factor of such relationships. This support took on a variety of forms; when discussing instances in which teachers had provided support, students remembered teachers giving them advice, helping them with learning tasks, and assisting with more abstract, global issues such as exploring possible goals and career options. Support-related codes accounted for a large portion (about 40%) of the things students wished teachers would do. Our findings align with Ozer, Wolf & Kong’s (2008) findings that adolescents experienced care through the typical support modes such as discussing problems or seeking advice, but also through the context of academic instruction (see also Schmakel, 2008’s example of teacher empathy). These findings also support the concept of teaches as “institutional agents,” who have the ability to directly or indirectly allocate resources or opportunities to students (Stanton-Salazar, 1997), and the importance of school-based social capital gathered through school networks in regards to youth postgraduation planning (Farmer-Hinton, 2008).
The provision of resources towards students’ achievement of goals accounted for nearly one third of discussions about support students reported having received, as well as nearly one third of discussions of support students desired. Students used phrases like “don’t hold you back in the class,” “helps me get to my interests and my goals,” and “talks about life” to describe past experiences of receiving resource support via teacher relationships, and also to describe the types of support students desired more of from teachers. One student explained that “‘Cause like you could talk to [teachers] about anything and they would motivate you,” but she also described her current school experience as not meeting that expectation, which “ticks you off a little bit.” Another student believed teachers can “motivate me to do better in school [rather] than to just goof off,” because they knew him well enough to have high expectations of him. Thus, one of the primary perceived benefits of strong, positive relationships with teachers is continued motivational resources to persist in academically challenging experiences related to attaining academic goals.
As can be seen above, many of these statements referred directly to instructional experiences. The value instructional experiences have to strengthening relationships has been found in other studies. For example, in Ozer, Wolf & Kong’s (2008) sample of ethnically diverse urban adolescent, more than half reported respect for teacher was based upon assessments of teaching effectiveness and clarity of instructional approach, while those same adolescents lost respect for teachers who did not explain course material or seem to care whether students understood it. The consistency of these findings across qualitative studies of adolescent–teacher relationships demonstrate the salience, or perceived importance, of these adolescent interpretations of school-based experience and of the value that the students assign to this kind of effort.
Barriers: Understanding Pattern and Contradiction
We define a cluster of emergent categories, barriers, as processes that prevent the two persons in a relationship from becoming interpersonally closer. Most often, these processes function to both undermine connections between students and teachers, and to prevent those connections from growing stronger. The most commonly discussed barrier was inattention: an instance in which a person does not adequately attend to another person’s actions or communicated thoughts. In this section, we describe students’ representations of some barriers described as detrimental but also a barrier unexpectedly described as appropriate and beneficial—that of boundaries.
Barriers that alienate youth
As mentioned above, our adolescent participants interpreted failed attempts, or the perceived lack of teacher attempts, to make a meaningful connection and offer support—especially in response to a problem—as a lack of caring. As one male explained:
I can truthfully say, most teachers now, they don’t care about their students, they just care about getting money. They just care about getting paid . . . if you don’t know what you’re doing, they’ll briefly show you but they’re not gonna like really show you. (Male, PA3)
Here, this adolescent perceived his teacher to attend to an instructional need superficially, and consequently the student equated this inattention to a lack of teacher investment in his well-being. In a more extreme example, one youth suggested his teachers cared so little about him, even in dire need, he would not receive assistance:
Say my mom and dad see me like on the streets. They would help me. And if, if my—like a teacher would see me, they’d probably just like, “Oh, you see what you did. You did, you just messed up there.” [Teachers] wouldn’t care. (Male, CA3)
Here, this adolescent contrasted the investments in his well-being made by his family with the investments made by school-based adults in order to demonstrate his interpretations of his relationships with teachers. Milner and Tenore’s (2010) proposal that teachers’ understandings of school as community, wherein students and teachers are conceptualized as family members as a critical component of culturally responsive classroom management, maps onto this adolescent’s lack of confidence in the teacher’s genuine investment in students’ well-being.
Statements similar to the one above demonstrate the perceived importance of teacher inattention. However, more than simply the lack of effortful engagement, incidences coded as inattention had a negative, not just neutral, connotation—teachers cared so little about them that they did not even pay attention. These references include phrases like “[teachers] never ask us about our background,” they “just teach,” the teacher “always says he has something else he has to do,” and teachers “just . . . give us the work.” From the complicated features of their lives outside of the classroom to their individual instructional needs, student statements indicated a belief that their teachers did not understand adolescents as individuals. One student summed it up saying “they don’t want to get to know us, that’s how it feels.”
Because empirical evidence exists that teachers are reluctant to get to know their students on an interpersonal level (see for example Davis, 2006), students likely perceive this hesitation accurately. Due to the fact that instructional experiences are co-constructed, barriers such as inattention can elicit behavioral response in students. As one student concluded, “I’m just not raising my hand or speaking to the teacher at all.”
In addition to the belief that many teachers do not attend to or care for students, some students reported believing that their teachers’ negative assumptions about students stemmed from the teacher having a stereotype: an instance when a person is presumed to behave, believe, think, or experience something simply because of some external categorization. Stereotyping moves beyond inattention, which could be due to any number of unintentional circumstances such as being overworked, a high number of students in a day, or too little time spent with any one student. Rather, stereotyping suggests an intentional neglect of individual differences in favor of overriding assumed group characteristics; as such, the following examples are more potentially damaging than the preceding.
Across all focus groups, there were almost as many incidences relayed of teachers enacting stereotypes as there were of teacher inattention (22 to 25 references, respectively); not surprisingly, no students reported stereotyping as something they wanted teachers to do. These beliefs were often discussed as undermining the potential for creating strong student–teacher relationships. Participants relayed multiple incidences of their teachers and school personnel applying stereotypes to themselves and their fellow students. These incidents could be stereotypes as broad as stereotypes about racial groups,
Last year when I was here I had my braids in and they thought automatically I was a bad student. (Male, PA3)
as specific as stereotypes about members of the same family,
I have a brother. He’s the total opposite of me and . . . [teachers] judge me like to my brother’s standards, and I’m a whole different person. (Male, PA3)
or based upon an individual’s academic achievement:
. . . the teachers that don’t really know me, they just judge me by my academics and stuff. (Female, CA2).
Students were quite aware of and sensitive to teachers’ stereotyping behaviors and negative assumptions. Awareness of stereotyping develops quite young (McKown & Weinstein, 2003), and some of the students in our focus groups were deeply affected by teachers’ negative assumptions. Students wished that teachers would take the time to find out more about them:
And just don’t look at it like, “our life or our looks”—just [looking] a little bit inside of the student would be better. (Male, PA4)
Students advocated that their teachers should give them the benefit of the doubt and expressed appreciation when teachers did evidence a nonjudgmental attitude toward students. Regardless of the variety of stereotype, students reported that these overgeneralizations obscured their unique features under the overlay of presumed characteristics. As we know from previous research, stereotypes have detrimental effects on how students see themselves and subsequently perform (Steele, 1997), and on how teachers evaluate their students (Downey & Pribesh, 2004). Our findings illustrate the effects of stereotypes on classroom functioning. These incidents acted as barriers preventing the student and teacher from growing closer, thus impacting not only their academics in a direct manner, but also in an indirect manner by prohibiting the satiation of the need for relatedness and connection between the student and teacher.
Boundaries as a developmentally supportive barrier
As adolescents move towards emerging adulthood, the optimal student–teacher relationship must support continued identity work and autonomy-seeking (Arnett, 2007). Adolescents’ desire to form relationships with adults remains, but these relationships must accommodate adolescent development (Davis, 2003). Our data suggest developmentally supportive school-based adult relationships are, in part, derived from the collaborative construction of boundary expectations. Establishing and maintaining clear, mutually constructed interpersonal boundaries does in fact keep certain aspects of two persons (i.e., student and adult) separate. However, within these boundaries students reported experiencing optimal student–teacher relational experiences. Based on our data, we theorize these interpersonal boundaries, as described by our adolescent participants, provide a sense of predictability and comfort.
The desire to coconstruct predictable and appropriate boundaries within the student–teacher relationship is evident in one student’s comment that “(i)t’s supposed to be a teacher and student relationship.” Another described the perceived importance of boundaries in this way:
I’d say [teachers should spend] time to know the student and get close with them as possible as you can, but not that close that they begin to feel like you’re doing something wrong. (Female, CA2)
Our participants were very clear that close student–teacher relationships are not friendships. Statements such as “(t)he teacher’s objective is to teach, not to have the students like the teacher,” “they’re not in my personal life, so I’m not going to get to know my teacher,” and “I don’t confide that much in my high school teachers, ‘cause that wouldn’t be appropriate” demonstrate that adolescents have different expectations for their relationships with teachers as compared to other social relationships. Based on our analyses, the student–teacher relationship as described by our participants is a professional one in which, under ideal conditions, both parties are invested in a common goal—that of the student’s academic success. For example, as one student stated in criticism of a teacher who she felt violated her boundary expectations:
I feel I’d rather have her sit down with me and critique what it is that I need in the class to pass and stuff, like—I mean, she talks to me about some of my interests, but, um, that’s not gonna get me to pass the class—and that’s my goal. (Female, CA2)
This adolescent focused her attention on passing the class; however, she felt that her teacher focused too much attention on the more personal question of her interests. Her expectations for the boundaries in their relationship oriented more towards the professional, while her teacher’s seemed, in the student’s opinion, to orient more towards the personal.
Our adolescent participants, like the one above, quite clearly stated which aspects of their personalities they felt comfortable sharing, and which they did not. Universally regarded as important, participants named students’ strengths and weaknesses as learners as the most vital personal information for a teacher to know. Interests and goals, almost universally agreed to be appropriate, were far less controversial than personal history, which typically split the adolescents in two groups, often differing on what they defined as personal history. Specifically, deep personal history, family circumstances, or anything that they could “get in trouble” about were not acceptable material to be shared; however, the fact that there are family circumstances that might warrant some leniency crossed back into acceptable information to share. Feelings and emotions, however, were typically regarded as too personal to share; one participant summed up this finding perfectly,
It’s supposed to be a teacher and student relationship. When you put feelings in it, it makes it like a friendship, but it’s not supposed to be. (Female, PA2)
The statements above seem to contradict—on the one hand promoting effortful engagement and support and on the other promoting interpersonal boundaries. These delicate distinctions indicate the complex reality of student–teacher relationships in high schools. Regardless of intentions, teachers’ bids, or attempts to engage students, might be misinterpreted as intrusions upon the students’ privacy, or as punitive actions. One student described this concept of bid misinterpretation in the following way:
The students probably take it in a different way, like a negative way, and they’re probably thinking in their mind, like get off my back or something . . . you know, you can’t breathe around [teachers]. (Male, CA3)
The challenge each student–teacher dyad faces lies in the construction of interpersonal boundaries that maximize the potential of the relationship to meet the student’s developmental needs and are close enough so that students feel cared for and supported, but not intruded upon. Social mores, power differentials, respect for privacy, and characteristics of each individual are likely all at play in the co-construction of these boundaries.
Ozer, Wolf and Kong (2008) suggest distinctions between the student as person and the student as learner are critical. Currently, though, these remain undifferentiated in the literature. Based on our results, one could make the parallel to those aspects of the adolescent which fall on either side of the boundaries—the self as learner consisting of the accessible aspects of the student, and the self as person consisting of those aspects that remain inaccessible. This distinction is exemplified in the following participant explanation:
. . . I think teachers need to get to know you like in the goals and interests area, but not in the feelings in area because that’s that kind of respect boundary. So they don’t need to know your past, like your whole past, everything that happened. They don’t need to know how you feel about everything. But, if they know what you’re interested in, they know where you want to go, not necessarily where you’ve been . . . I don’t know, just get involved somehow. (Female, PA2)
The respect boundary the adolescent referred to brings to the forefront a key characteristic of student–teacher relationships linked to academic achievement. As the youth says, teachers don’t need to know a student’s “whole past,” but teachers do need to know where a student wants to go and what that student is interested in, and this information will be highly individualized. Determining the aspects of the student most relevant to reach academic goals is a level of specificity needed so that the positive student–teacher relationship is not the end of itself; rather, it is the translation of that supportive relationship into academic achievement and positive outcomes that matters.
Building bridges while respecting boundaries
Effortful engagement leads to knowledge and connection, but its success depends on existing knowledge. In other words, possessing some degree of knowledge about individual students, then, gives the teacher a greater opportunity to individualize interactions based on student’s characteristics. Participants described a multitude of initial approaches teachers might take in order to unobtrusively collect information. Similar to the suggestions for simple modes of effortful engagement offered above, our participants also suggested methods for gathering information about students. For example, several students recommended learning through classroom observation:
Well, I don’t think the teacher should really ask the student, I think the teacher should study the student. Not like in a stalking way, [laughter] but just like study them. (Male, CA3)
This student clearly voiced his desire for the upholding of boundaries regarding the solicitation of personal information along with the simultaneous desire to be known by his teachers within these comfortable boundaries. The participants promoted observation for several reasons, including the notion that “how you interact with your friends in the classroom” allows for a “double-sided view” of the student. Some adolescents even recommended specific things for teachers to attend to, and these recommendations focused on the teacher gathering some degree of tricky emotion information without alarming the student or forcing them to discuss a personal issue. However, as our participants pointed out, this kind of classroom environment needed to be established from the beginning of the school year in order for students to feel comfortable.
Additional suggestions demonstrated the adolescents’ opinion that instruction is closely linked to this process. For example, participants recommended simply asking the student if they needed help or if everything was alright on a frequent basis. Participants also suggested teachers have students write about their goals, interests, questions or concerns and then using that information to plan for interpersonal and instructional interactions. Finally, the participants recommended caution, both when teachers joke around with their students in that it can cross the line into too offensive, and also when asking students questions. One participant cautioned against “(b)eing nosey” saying that this when questions are too intrusive and cross the boundary, whereas being “friendly is just get to know the person; . . . (a)nd then keep that into yourself,” stressing maintaining confidence as key.
Students reflected on how teachers might communicate positive intentions during attempts to effortfully engage that could decrease a student’s likelihood of becoming defensive. One student presented one way in which teachers might be more likely to make a meaningful connection:
I guess they just need to make it known that they’re there for support, but not to force talking upon anyone. (Female, PA1)
This type of bid gives students the ability to choose whether or not to engage in help-seeking, personal disclosure, or any other act of relating, while simultaneously working toward meeting the students’ needs for relatedness by demonstrating both a degree of care and respect for the student as a unique individual. Thus, boundaries can simultaneously be understood as appropriate and desired support for adolescents’ establishment of an independent identity, as well as indications that adolescents clearly understand the role of teachers as gatekeepers to critical resources.
Conclusion
One youth’s lament about a particular teacher provides a key takeaway from our interpretations of adolescents’ understanding and experiencing relationships with teachers in high school:
One of my teachers, sometimes, I feel that her way, her approach to trying to [engage] her students is by getting her students to like her. And I think that that’s not, that shouldn’t be the teacher’s objective. (Female, CA2)
Here, this female student recognized what Toshalis (2011) calls the “rhetoric of care”—a care that “ultimately produces symbolic violence through the deflection of accountability, the foreclosure of opportunity, and the disregard for sociopolitical inequities.” By not taking responsibility for providing a genuinely caring, supportive environment, taking steps to provide opportunities relevant to the adolescent’s needs, or even acknowledging some students simply need more assistance than others, but instead choosing to merely garner surface level affection, this teacher is a disappointment to her student. As a case example of missed opportunity for genuine student–teacher connection, this critical perspective of impersonal, shallow care offered by the adolescent focuses us on teachers’ objectives.
Our focus group participants, representing a diverse cross-section of urban US high school students, had very clear and consistent perceptions of typical student–teacher relationships, and of how these relationships should function optimally. In our data, we identified bridging processes, the most important of which were incidences in which the teacher undertook intentional actions so as to engage or connect with their students. The adolescent participants repeatedly endorsed appreciation for and clarified the value of the effort that their teachers expend when they make bids or overtures at interactions with them. Though these overtures may be as small as demonstrating an understanding of how the student is feeling or helping with a difficult learning task, these bids let students know that their teacher cares about them and is invested in their success as individuals.
We likewise identified barrier processes, the most salient of which were incidences of perceived teacher inattention and stereotyping. All of the barriers discussed by our participants demonstrated a lack of investment in the student as an individual, and again, our participants demonstrated a marked attunement to the repercussions of these interactions, and stated a strong desire for these occurrences to be less prevalent in their daily interactions.
We also identified an essential process of establishing mutually constructed boundaries. While these processes do not bridge two people together, they also do not act as a typical barrier. Instead, mutually constructed boundaries establish shared respect and guidelines for appropriate behavior within the normative roles of teacher and student. Based upon our data, we hypothesize students and teachers working together to establish these boundaries allows for a direct translation into academic achievement and positive youth outcomes.
We argue attention to both bridges and barriers will improve student engagement and academic achievement models. Relatively few participants reported consistently experiencing positive, supportive relationships with teachers in which their needs were met; instead, many reported generally feeling un-cared for and misunderstood by teachers. By recounting rare supportive encounters with teachers and revealing perspectives on ideal student–teacher relationships, participants were able to provide valuable information about how teachers might simultaneously meet students’ academic and relational needs.
Implications for Educational Practice
Despite this evidence that student–teacher relationships matter to youth outcomes, policymakers tend to focus on increased student achievement rather than the social processes and relational aspects of schooling that may strongly influence this achievement. A brief review of several successful Race to the Top (RTTT) recipients illustrates how policymakers systematically neglect considerations of student–teacher relationships. In these recipients’ proposals, the quality of student–teacher relationships is reduced to to-be-determined status or undefined references to school climate, or are considered the domain of external community partners who service such concerns (e.g., Delaware Department of Education, 2010; Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2010; Tennessee Department of Education, 2010). Current economic and political pressures generate conditions that are not conducive to high levels of contact between students and teachers; understanding how to maximize the limited interactions that students and teachers do experience is critical.
To be fair, however, our empirical understanding of how and why positive student–teacher relationships translate into student engagement, and ultimately student achievement, is still developing. In particular, how students and teachers collaboratively construct supportive relationships and the contribution of these relationships in promoting student engagement in learning is of particular relevance. Additionally, our findings regarding the desire for interpersonal boundaries may seem to contradict previous work which indicates that students desire deep, more intimate relationships with their teachers (see, for example, Cammarota & Romero, 2006; Valenzuela, 1999). However, we propose that rather than constituting a contradiction to these previous works, our findings regarding boundary expectations instead reflect a reaction to the pragmatic concerns of such contextual factors as the intensity of maintaining status among peers, instructional strategies that lack enacted purpose, and hostile interactions with school-based adults faced by our youth participants.
Teachers face tremendous obstacles in establishing meaningful relationships with even some of their students, let alone all of them (Weinstein, Madison, & Kuklinski, 1995). In a hypothetical school, a given teacher may have classes of anywhere from 20 to 40, and may have up to eight different classes a day, which they may only see two or three times a week. Likewise, a high school student may have up to eight different teachers in one day; switch classes half-way through the year and therefore have courses with up to sixteen different teachers in a year; only see each for 45 min to an hour each day; and only have a given teacher for one course. In today’s economic climate, schools are being asked to do more with less, intensifying already existing challenges.
Sadly, some schools may pose even more challenges than these pragmatic ones. As Valenzuela (1999) points out, in many schools where students’ strengths, such as their cultural heritage, are devalued, student–teacher relationships are “often fragile, incomplete, or nonexistent” (p. 5). However, when students are given the opportunity to form relationships with their teachers based on interpersonal communication, valuing of opinions, and purposeful activities, they may grow to desire and appreciate more intimate understandings of their teachers (e.g., Romero, Arce, & Cammarota, 2009). Previous research has found that negative student–teacher interactions can consist of the teacher engaging in gossiping, stereotyping, or even bullying (Whitted & Dupper, 2008). In rushed, anonymizing, and even hostile school environments, determining which teachers are “safe” to form a relationship with is a risky gamble that many students may not wish to make. In such a high-stakes environment, in which the student’s academic future, social standing and emotional health may face ramifications for trusting in the wrong person, many students may do as our participants suggested when they expressed a preference for caution via the maintenance of interpersonal boundaries.
These realities do not negate the need for what Valenzuela (1999) and Toshalis (2011) have labeled authentic caring, but do mean that adolescents may temper their expectations regarding the extent to which a supportive interpersonal relationship can be formed within a given school context. Thus, by understanding relatedness and autonomy existing simultaneously within the mutually constructed boundary expectations, as endorsed by our youth participants, these boundaries can function in dysfunctional environments as protective structures within which students can maintain a positive sense of self.
Building positive student–teacher relationships does not need to occur outside of everyday instructional practices. It is likely that a set of high leverage teaching practices could be identified as high leverage precisely because they increase student learning and build connections between students and teachers simultaneously. This strategy represents a no-cost, high impact approach. For example, teachers can structure learning activities to explicitly recognize an adolescents’ evolving identity as an individual, such as have been found to engage youth in productive explorations of both self and content (Bondy, Ross, Gallingane, & Hambacher, 2007; Faircloth, 2009). These experiences, we believe, provide an organized structure for youth to actively explain what they think and why they think it, rather than passively consume prepackaged information; research on early-career teachers has found that such collaborative experiences of joint learning positively benefit the teacher, too (Donnell, 2007). Likewise, a teacher’s ability to engage in “proximal formative assessment” (Erickson, 2007), or in-the-moment taking stock of individual student comprehension, assists teachers in planning future instructional moves. This coincides with the observational strategies promoted by our adolescent participants. And finally, by using “revoicing techniques” teachers can connect students’ everyday language with academic language, in order to maintain students’ ownership of ideas yet promote their usage of scientific language (Windschitl et al., 2010). We believe these kind of revoicing techniques promote the teacher’s authentic listening, and demonstrate to youth the teacher’s commitment to student learning.
Limitations and Future Research
An inductive data analysis approach combined with a focus group method effectively yielded the depth of information required to undertake a thematic analyses of students’ perspectives on student–teacher social interactions. However, our study is not without limitations. Group dynamics may have played some role in individuals’ willingness to share dissenting perspectives (Stewart, Shamdasani, & Rook, 2007), especially in cases where groups were large and consisted of peers of differing social status within the group.
Our participant recruitment through community-based extra-curricular programs may have led to sampling a more limited population of youth than sampling through a school-based setting would have afforded us. Though our sample did represent an ethnically diverse cross-section of youth, our selection of recruitment sites focused on low-mid affluence-level neighborhoods and the programs that service them. Although using community-oriented sites limited the school and academic standing data that we were able to collect, this sampling strategy did afford us the ability to analyze across schools and across geographic location (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; and Minneapolis, Minnesota) for consistency of themes.
Additionally, descriptive data on student characteristics would have strengthened our investigation. For example, current academic standing or level of engagement in school, personality traits, and belief systems all may influence what factors different individuals perceive as bridges versus barriers. Understanding how student characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, family affluence, and academic achievement influence school-based social processes is critical. It is likely that some students prompt positive environmental responses and others do not; examining student–environment interactions paired with a detailed investigation of teacher practice is needed to fully understand how student–teacher relationships function in high schools. Further, exploring schools which support student–teacher relationships to both high and low degrees would allow for an exploration of the contextual factors hypothesized to account for apparent discrepancies regarding the degree of intimacy desired by adolescents.
Conducting similar focus groups with secondary school teachers would provide an enriched understanding of the themes and perspectives identified in this research, because we could explore the convergences and divergences of perspectives among teachers and between teachers and students. In particular, teachers may contribute additional information regarding how to successfully navigate around practical barriers, such as increasingly large class sizes and mounting pressure to focus on test preparation, which can impede the formation of substantive relationships with students.
Finally, observational studies of teacher practice would provide an ecologically valid understanding of the salient themes identified in this article. Ultimately, we believe attending to adolescent perceptions not only underscores the importance of relatedness within high schools, but also provides theoretical insight into the mechanisms by which this can be achieved.
Footnotes
Appendix
Author’s Note
Two additional manuscripts in this series have been submitted for publication—please see references for full citations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed the receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Central Research Development Fund at the University of Pittsburgh funded this research; the authors received no financial support for the authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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