This study examines teachers’ and children’s perceptions of dependency, and their linkages with other relationship dimensions, in a cultural context with a more collectivistic orientation. Additionally, it examines the factorial validity and reliability of the Greek version of the Child Appraisal of Relationship with Teacher Scale (CARTS) and teacher-child perceptions' convergence of relationship quality. Participants were 348 kindergarten students and 35 teachers from Greek kindergarten classrooms. The measures used were the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) and CARTS. Results verified the factorial validity and internal consistency of the Greek CARTS. Results replicated previous findings suggesting a positive association between Closeness and Dependency in both teachers’ and children’s perceptions. The finding about the positive association between closeness and dependency in a cultural context with a more collectivistic orientation, challenges the cultural universality of the construct of dependency and highlights the need for a more in-depth examination of the construct of dependency.

The present generation of young people who nowadays attend higher education curricula are accustomed to receiving information and knowledge through audiovisual material. Creating a digital story can assist students to learn more on the subject they study as well as to help them overcome obstacles that hinder the presentation of their gained knowledge. The aim of this paper was to examine the use of audiovisual tools in the educational procedure of sport journalism higher education courses. Thirty-eight students in the School of Journalism at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki were asked to present a team sport in a video form. Following the general instructions from the teachers they were able to use any kind of equipment and software they chose to create the audiovisual production. Upon the completion of the projects and based on an embedded mixed research design they were asked to answer a short questionnaire and afterwards to participate in two focus group discussions. The results revealed that the employment of technological tools to create, present, and furthermore express themselves was warmly accepted and the participants stated that it provided a vivid educational environment, which besides enhancing the process of teaching, contributed to the acquisition of skills and their right utilization.

The Student–Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) is one of the most extensively used instruments that evaluate the quality of teacher–child relationships. The STRS has a strong theoretical background based on attachment theory and research on parent–child and teacher–child relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine the dimensional structure of the adapted STRS proposed by Koomen et al. (2012) in the Greek educational settings. Another purpose was to examine the intercorrelations of the Dependency subscale with the Closeness and Conflict subscales of the adapted version of STRS, when applied in a cultural context different from the context, where it was developed originally. We applied confirmatory factor analyses with item parcelling in two independent samples (N₁ = 118 teachers, 921 students and N₂ = 118 teachers, 925 students). Findings provided evidence for the dimensional structure of the adapted STRS subscales and its validity. Results also showed that the Dependency subscale is positively correlated with Closeness in Greece as a background with more collectivistic characteristics. This finding suggests that the cultural universality of dependency can be challenged and that the possible socio-cultural influences in the nature and interpretation of dependent relationships needs to be further examined.

Teacher-child relationships in early childhood are a fundamental prerequisite for children's social, emotional, and academic development. The Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) is one of the most widely accepted and used instruments that evaluate the quality of teacher-child relationships. STRS is a 28-item questionnaire that assess three relational dimensions, Closeness, Conflict, and Dependency. The relevant literature has shown a pattern regarding the difficulty to support the STRS factor structure with CFA, while it is well-documented with EFA. Recently, a new statistical technique was proposed to combine the best of the CFA and EFA namely, the Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM). The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the factor structure of the STRS in a Greek national sample. Toward this end, the ESEM framework was applied in order to overcome the limitations of EFA and CFA, (b) to confirm previous findings about the cultural influence in teacher-child relationship patterns, and (c) to examine the invariance of STRS across gender and age. Early educators from a representative Greek sample size of 535 child care and kindergarten centers completed the STRS for 4,158 children. CFA as well as ESEM procedures were implemented. Results showed that ESEM provided better fit to the data than CFA in both groups, supporting the argument that CFA is an overly restrictive approach in comparison to ESEM for the study of STRS. All primary loadings were statistically significant and were associated with their respective latent factors. Contrary to the existing literature conducted in USA and northern Europe, the association between Closeness and Dependency yielded a positive correlation. This finding is in line with previous studies conducted in Greece and confirm the existence of cultural differences in teacher-child relationships. In addition, findings supported the configural, metric, scalar, and variance/covariance equivalence of the STRS between males and females and between preschoolers (3–5 years) and early primary years (5–7 years). Latent factor means comparisons showed that females seem to have a warmer and more dependent relationship with their teachers and are less conflictual in comparison to males.