Teacher empathy messages: The role of teacher enthusiasm and student outcomes

Recent research has increasingly focused on the role of teachers' empathy in classrooms. However, due to the inconsistencies observed in its conceptualization and assessment, whether this competence is key for effective teaching remains unknown. Grounding empathy research on previous approaches to the understanding of emotions, such as the control-value theory, could be the key to assess teachers' empathy messages, understood as their demonstration of an understanding students' context, appraisals and emotions. Moreover, reaching an understanding on how teacher motivation might shape their instructional practices (i.e., messages) and these student outcomes is also crucial. This study aimed to develop a framework of teachers' empathy messages, examined their use of across the academic year, and how contextual classroom characteristics, teachers' enthusiasm and students' grades related to their usage. Participants included 45 teachers and 1370 students distributed in 66 classrooms across 24 high schools. Teacher empathy messages were assessed through audio recording of teachers' speech during lessons. Messages were extracted from transcriptions with the help of large language models. Teacher enthusiasm was assessed on T1 and T3. Student's grades were collected from academic records at the end of the course (T3). Overall, the number of students per class increased the number of emotion empathy messages used by the teacher. Teachers' enthusiasm was associated with the number of messages used whereas no significant relation was observed between messages and students' grades. This study presents a practical framework to assess teacher empathy messages. Findings also highlight how teacher motivation (i.e., enthusiasm) can shape their teaching practices.