Does school kindness lead to greater school engagement? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence in the Philippine context

ABSTRACT

Studies have shown that kind school climates are linked to positive psychological outcomes. Yet, there is scant evidence on how school kindness relates to subjective and objective measures of academic success. This research addresses this gap by examining the associations of school kindness with academic achievement and engagement using cross-sectional (Study 1) and longitudinal (Study 2) designs among Filipino high school students. Study 1 demonstrated that school kindness positively predicted agentic, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement after controlling for demographic covariates and dispositional kindness. School kindness marginally predicted subjective academic performance. Study 2 showed that Time 1 school kindness positively predicted Time 2 behavioral engagement even after controlling for demographic covariates and auto-regressor effects. Results suggest that fostering kindness in school can be a potential route to facilitate students’ active participation in academic activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic achievement
• academic engagement
• school kindness
• positive education

Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Dennis McInerney for sharing valuable feedback to improve the earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by the Internal Research Grant 2017–2018 (RG 90/2017-2018 R) from The Education University of Hong Kong awarded to the first author.