Mediating teacher liking and moderating authoritative teachering on chinese adolescents' perceptions of antisocial and prosocial behaviors

The authors present a model of adolescents' peer relations in the classroom that integrates 3 social processes involving the adolescent students, the classroom teacher, and peers. One of the hypotheses was that teacher liking of students mediated the relation between students' social behaviors (e.g., antisocial disruption and prosocialleadership) and peer acceptance. This mediating teacher influence was also hypothesized to be moderated by the extent to which adolescent students perceived their teacher to be authoritative in teachering. These hypotheses were tested and supported on the basis of a sample of 659 Chinese middle school students. A discussion of these results focuses on the classroom teacher as a social context in the study of children's social interactions in the classroom.