Mitigating the damage: Can parental and teacher support prevent depressive students from failing in school?

Description

The closing of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected education and social life of adolescents, resulting in a reduction of well-being through rising levels of depressive symptoms (Buizza et al., 2022). Depression is known to bias information processing (Beevers et al., 2011), but also to be modified by protective factors like social support. Studies in the school context focusing on whether parents' and teachers' support can buffer depressive students from school failure, however, are lacking.
The present study, therefore, aimed to examine whether social support from parents and teachers can mitigate the negative effect of depression on academic achievement caused by biased information processing. Representative data from 30 Austrian secondary schools was collected in a longitudinal survey study with four measurement waves. The sample consisted of 1473 students (Mage = 17.45, SD = 0.75) in 11th grade from 103 classes. Depression was measured with the PHQ (Gräfe et al., 2004). Information processing in terms of attention, parental support, and teacher support were assessed with well-established self-report measures (Klingsieck et al., 2018; Mojoribanks, 2002). Achievement was assessed via students’ most current class report marks. All scales showed good reliability (ω=.68-.87). CFA models showed good fit indices, indicating construct validity for all scales.
To answer our research question, we calculated two moderated mediator models with attention as mediator and parental and teacher support as moderator, respectively. Data was analysed with Mplus using cluster-robust standard errors to control for the nested data structure, bootstrapping for bias-corrected confidence intervals and FIML to deal with missing values. Consistent with previous findings, we found significant gender effects for depression (b=.282), showing higher scores for female students, and included gender as a covariate in the main models.
Preliminary analyses revealed a significant negative association between depression and the mediator attention (bTeacher =-.405, bParents = -.391), while attention was positively associated with achievement (bTeacher = .08, bParents = .104). Further, teacher and parental support showed significant positive associations with attention (bTeacher =.094, bParents =.120), but no moderating effect on the indirect relationship between depression and achievement. The results indicate that teacher and parental support are important factors to help students focus while learning, however, they cannot mitigate the negative effect of depressive symptoms on achievement. In the classroom, targeted attention exercises (e.g., improving attention span, attention switching, and selective attention) might help students with depressive symptoms to focus better and thereby improve their achievement.

Period	18 Sept 2023
Event title	PAEPS 2023 : Conference of the Expert Group on Educational Psychology
Event type	Conference
Conference number	19
Location	Kiel, Germany, Schleswig-HolsteinShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International