Do satisfied teachers teach more effectively than their less satisfied colleagues? Although previous research has investigated the factors which lead to teachers being more satisfied with their jobs (Collie et al., 2012; Kasalak & Dagyar, 2020; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2014), not much attention has been given to the impact of job satisfaction on pedagogic quality.
We took data from the OECD’s TALIS-2018 survey – in which 260,000 teachers from 48 economies/regions participated – to investigate this relationship and to determine if the quality of student–teacher relationships was a mediating variable. We used ‘cognitive activation’ and ‘teaching clarity’ to operationalise pedagogic quality. We also tested the influence of cultural differences on the relationships among student–teacher relationships, job satisfaction and pedagogic quality (Li & Yamamoto, 2020), by categorising data from nine of the regions participating in the TALIS-2018 survey into Eastern Confucian contexts (N = 27,106; Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Shanghai) and Western English-speaking contexts (N = 20,209; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom).
