Teacher Support and Student Engagement: Correlation Study on Students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat

Students who are passive in learning, get bored easily, have no interest in lessons, and do not explore what is being learned are indications of low student engagement. Student engagement is student involvement in learning both in the academic and non-academic fields which can be seen through behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. One of the factors that influence student engagement is the perception of teacher support. This study aims to determine the relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. The research subjects were 146 students. Data collection used a scale of perceptions of teacher support and a scale of student engagement. Data analysis used Pearson product moment correlation using SPSS 23.0 for windows. The results of the data analysis showed that the hypothesis was accepted, there was a positive relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement among students at SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. Obtained a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.456 and a correlation significance value of 0.000 (p <0.001), which means that the level of perceptions of teacher support was related to student engagement


Introduction
Students have various dynamics of problems in the learning process, for example low achievement, boredom in learning, and passive during class discussions, student engagement answers these problems. Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) state that student engagement is one of the keys to overcoming students' academic problems, as previously mentioned.
Student engagement is the involvement of students in the learning process both in academic and nonacademic fields which can be seen through behavioral engagement (involvement in behavior), emotional engagement (involvement in emotions), and cognitive engagement (involvement in cognitive) in students in their learning environment (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004). Behavioral engagement focuses on student participation in academic, social, and extra-curricular activities. Emotional engagement focuses on positive and negative reactions to teachers, classmates, lessons, and school. Cognitive engagement focuses on the extent to which students try to understand the lesson.
High student involvement in schools is very important in supporting an effective learning process. Effective learning is expected to assist students in achieving educational goals, including students actively developing their potential to have religious spiritual strength, self-control, personality, intelligence, noble character, and skills needed by themselves, society, nation and state (Law No. 20 of 2003 Article 1 Paragraph 1 concerning the National Education System). Student engagement in the learning process has many positive impacts, both for students, teachers and schools. Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) describe the results of student engagement in the form of achievement and low dropout rates. Students with student engagement are students who have positive things at school, are enthusiastic, full of energy, are active in class discussions, totality in carrying out their duties and roles as students, have a high sense of carrying out the rules at school, and have positive feelings to friends, teachers, and school. Previous study from Vissanastri and Rustam (2019) found that students who had positive perceptions about school reputation, school fees, teacher attention, extracurricular activities, school physical condition, and school outreach. So, when students have positive perceptions about their school, they will participate in teaching and learning activities comfortably. This kind of comfort increase the students' motivation to study and engage to the classroom learning activity.
Emotional engagement was indicated by positive feelings of students towards teachers, classmates, lessons and schools (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004). It was found that from 100 students 94% of students had a comfortable feeling at school, 95% of students had pleasant feelings towards school friends, 80% of students were bored of studying at school, and 65% of students could felt that school is as comfort as home because of their friendly friends. Students who feel bored while studying indicate one dimension of engagement, namely low emotional engagement. However, it was found that feelings of pleasure and happiness towards school and friends were an indication of high emotional engagement. This makes researchers interested in this phenomenon and needs further identification.
Cognitive engagement is the extent to which students invest themselves in learning, namely students repeat their lessons at home and use learning strategies to understand complex things (Fredrick and McColskey, 2012). It was found that 83% of students had repeated lessons at home even though there was no exam. This initial finding indicates that cognitive engagement is quite good but contradicts the results of observations on student learning scores.
The low level of student involvement was related to the intensity of dropping out and the level of student aspirations. Student engagement research conducted by Archambault, Janosz, Fallu and Pagani (2009) on Canadian adolescents, found that adolescents who have low student engagement are at high risk of dropping out of school. Students with low student engagement have the potential to cause some academic problems. Such as dropout problems or dropouts (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004;Archambault, Janosz, Fallu, and Pagani, 2009), low achievement (Dharmayana, Masrun, Kumara, and Wirawan, 2012;Utami and Kusdiyati, 2014;Sa'adah and Ariati, 2018), academic burnout or fatigue to study demands (Arlinkasari and Akmal, 2017), and depression (Li and Lerner, 2012).
The magnitude of the impact that arises due to low student engagement encourages researchers to understand more deeply about the factors that influence student engagement. Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) explain several factors that influence student engagement, namely school-level factor, classroom context (teacher support, peers, classroom structure, autonomy support, and task characteristic), individual needs. Fredricks, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) stated that teacher support can directly affect behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Teacher support according to Belmont, Skinner, Wellborn, and Connel (1992) is the support provided by the teacher to students, which can be seen through teacher involvement, autonomy support, and the provision of a clear structure from the teacher. Belmont, Skinner, Wellborn, and Connel (1992) developed a theory of teacher behavior, where teacher support given to students affects student involvement in learning. In line with the theory of Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) that teacher support affects student engagement.
Teacher support is correlated with behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement of students (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004) because teachers spend most of their time in class with students. Several previous studies related to teacher support and student engagement are as follows. Longitudinal research conducted by Klem and Connell (2004) shows that there is a significant relationship between teacher support and student engagement. Chen (2005) examined the relationship between social support variables (family, teachers, and peers) with academic engagement. It was found that teacher support contributed directly to academic engagement, and among other social support variables, the teacher support variable had a greater contribution to academic engagement.
Even though teacher support theoretically has a positive effect on student engagement (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004), there are also research results that show different results, as found by Ansong, Okumu, Bowen, Walker and Eisensmith (2017) examining the relationship between between social support variables (family, classmates and teacher support) correlated with student engagement. Has a finding that teacher support is neither a mediator nor a predictor of student engagement. In line with Straiti's research, Schmidt and Maier (2016) found that the teacher support variable was inconsistently related to student engagement. This study aims to determine the relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in the context of junior high school students. Based on the theoretical study and the description above, the hypothesis proposed is that there is a relationship between the perception of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat A sense of community skill is defined as a habit of social-emotional relationships formed in the community. Children are social beings that will be a part of a community in which they should have basic social skills for establishing a strong relationships. McMillan and Chavis (1986) state that sense of community is a feeling or sense that shows that every member of the community has a bound sense, a mutual sense where every member is valuable in that community, and a belief of having similar needs that can be filled through a commitment of being together. It can be concluded that a sense of community is an early childhood skill of having an interaction and socialization dynamically to increase their self-values and roles as a part of a community.
The recent issue reveals that the sense of community skills of the early childhoods cannot be developed well due to the rapid changes in the society that is caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Indonesian government publishes a new regulation which is about a social distancing that causes a distance interaction and socialization occurs in the society. In addition, COVID-19 pandemic also affects another field such as education. Indonesian Minister of Education and Culture publishes an instruction through the regulation number 1, 2020 as a prevention of COVID-19 in which it demands every stakeholder to conduct a distance learning or online learning.
The emergence of COVID-19 gives a significant changes toward the activities in stimulating children's abilities particularly in the early childhood education program. It is found that there is a new problem faced which is the lack of stimulation toward children's social skills that will be a forming basis of sense of community. The early childhood education program needs a more specialized and direct service than other educational levels. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic occurs, school is the best place for stimulating the social emotional skills of the early childhood students. Students can be free to socialize and interact with their friends and meet a lot of people in around their neighborhood. Pooley et al., (2008) found that primary school children spontaneously defined sense of community in terms of people, places for activities and interaction, and co-operation. The changes also occurs to the learning process. The conventional learning that is conducted before is effective for covering all the aspects such as; cognitive, affective, and psychomotor but now it is changed into a distance learning. It significantly influences the early childhood students' development. Further, several vital roles that schools played in supporting the community at large. These included being a source of community knowledge, supplying a common meeting place and offering a point from which to develop networks of support and friendship. More widely, it has been contended that communities should be understood as settings that can foster interdependence, mutual commitment, and provide support, with the notion of helping being the core element (Barrera, 2000).
Students tend to have an experience that build their knowledge and motivate them to be a better individual when they conduct a face to face activities at school. The early childhood education is an educational level which has a strategic role in developing children's early potential for fulfilling their growth and preparing them to be ready to join the next educational level (Sudrajat, 2020). Schools, as social institutions, have an important role to play in forming and maintaining constructive geographical and relational communities (Witten, McCreanor & Kearns, 2007). The early childhoods require others' assistance because they cannot manage their psychiatric in dependently particularly regarded to their social interaction and emotional.
There is a degradation toward some aspects of children's development during the distance learning. The observation shows that the religious moral, cognitive, physical psychomotor, language and art can be stimulated well through the assignments given by the teachers and it is done by the students at home with their parents' guidance. On another hand, the social development cannot be achieved well or it can be said that it experiences a significant degradation viewed from several aspects such as; self-awareness, responsibility, and their prosocial behavior during the online learning. It is influenced by the learning system used in the early childhood education program which is the task-based method used by the teachers, so the intensity and frequent of the task given by the teachers stabilize students' psychiatric (Sukatin, 2020). The lack of students' social skills emerges an inhibition toward the stimulation of sense of community that can be seen through the limited interaction done by the students during the online learning. It also significantly affects students' learning interest, motivation, and their social abilities. These distractions are logic consequents of online learning in which it can give a negative influence towards the early childhood students that cannot be controlled (Mashar, 2015).
The stimulation method used by the teachers should fulfill the students' development and increase their learning interest during the online learning. Effendi (2008) states that stimulation is an activity to stimulate children's basic ability to grow and develop optimally. Every child needs to have a routine stimulation as early as possible at every chance that can be done by their mother, father, caregiver, and other people who are close with them. Habituation method is one of methods that can be used to develop children's sense of community at home. It is stated that habituation is a way that can be done by familiarizing children to behave based on the value and norms in the society. Habituation is an effective way used as the early education to build children's social abilities considering that the early childhoods have a strong memory and it is an early stage to build their self-character which makes them easier to be stimulated at home. The values that have been embedded in the children selves will be invested for their adulthood. The habituation can form the sense of community for the early childhood which is really needed to be built in this modern era (Arief, 2002). Therefore, teachers have to concern on the many aspects particularly the early childhoods' characteristics and development in arranging online based-learning.
However, the online learning conducted in every school is still not optimal enough for stimulating the sense of community skills for the early childhoods in which it only develops students' cognitive skills, religious moral, physical psychomotor, and language and art. It is relevant to the daily facts where the early childhoods dominantly do an academic learning process which emphasizes students' skills at reading, writing, and counting. It shows that their sense of community is poorly trained during the learning process. The fact indicates that the learning process has to be developed into a relevant process of children which is implementing the learning concept through a fun activity (playing) assisted by habituation method. This study is aimed at elaborating the sense of community stimulation for the students conducted by the teachers of the early childhood education program during the online learning.

Methods
This study is a correlational study to find a relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. This study uses probability sampling with simple random sampling technique. The sample in this study amounted to 146 students. The scale used in this study is in the form of 2 modified scales, including the scale of student engagement to measure student engagement developed by Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004), and the Teacher As Social Context (TASC) scale to measure perceptions of teacher support. developed by Belmont, Skinner, Wellborn and Connel (1992). Data analysis on the relationship between teacher support and student engagement uses Pearson's product moment analysis.

Findings and Discussion
Based on the data obtained from 146 research subjects, it can be arranged a description of the subject data based on gender. Based on the table. 1 it is known that the students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat in this study amounted to 146 people with 85 male subjects (58.2%) and 61 female subjects (41.8%). Hypothesis testing in this study was conducted to determine the level of significance of the relationship between the perceived teacher support variable and the student engagement variable. The data analysis technique used is the product moment correlation technique. The provisions are accepted or rejected if a hypothesis is below or equal to 0.05 (p 0.05) (Muhammad, 2016). The results of the analysis obtained can be seen in the table below.

Sig (p) Information
Perceptions of Teacher Support with Student Engagement 0,456** 0,000 Hypothesis Accepted **. Significant correlation at 0.01 level Based on the table 2, it is known that the significance value between the perceived teacher support variable and student engagement is 0.000 and the value is smaller than 0.01 (p = 0.000 <0.01). Thus, in accordance with the terms of acceptance and rejection of the hypothesis as stated above, the main hypothesis proposed in this study "there is a relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat" is accepted.
Based on the calculation, the categorization of the teacher support perception variable is describe on the table 3. It can be seen that on the teacher support perception variable there are 27 research subjects in the less positive category (18.5%), 91 research subjects in the positive category (62.3%), and 26 research subjects in the very positive category (19.2 %). This means that the majority of the subjects in this study have a positive perception of teacher support.
Fitriyani & Gusripanto / Teacher Support and Student Engagement: Correlation Study on Student of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat In student engagement variable there are 24 research subjects include as in the low category (16.4%), 101 research subjects in the medium category (69.2%), and 21 research subjects in the high category (14.4%). This means that the majority of the subjects in this study have fairly good student engagement. The student engagement variable categorization is obtained as follows. This study aims to determine the relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. The results of pearson product moment correlation analysis with the help of SPSS 23.0 for windows obtained r = 0, 456; p = 0.000 (p<0.01) indicates that there is a significant positive relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. This means that the hypothesis proposed in the study "there is a relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat, Indragiri Hulu Regency, Riau" is accepted. This means that the perceived level of teacher support is related to student engagement at SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. In other words, the higher the perception of teacher support, the higher the student engagement, and vice versa, the lower the perception of teacher support, the lower the student engagement of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat.
The results of this study also found that the teacher support perception variable contributed 20.7% to the student engagement variable, the remaining 79.3% was determined by other variables. Thus there are still many other variables that affect student engagement variables. This is in line with Fredrick's (2004) statement that teacher support is one that affects student engagement and there are many other variables such as school-level, classroom context and individual needs.
The results of this study are in line with the theory stated (Skinner and Belmont, 1993;Fredrick, 2004) that teacher support is one of the factors that influence student engagement. This study is in line with research conducted by Klem and Connel (2004) that the perception of teacher support has a relationship with student engagement. This research is also reinforced by the research of Straiti, Schmidt and Maier (2016) that teacher support, especially instrumental support, is correlated with engagement. Galugu and Samsinar (2019) found that teacher support was correlated with student engagement.
This strengthens the findings in this study that teacher support perceived by students has a relationship with student engagement. Students will be more involved in lessons if they feel comfortable with their teachers in the form of closeness between teachers and students or called involvement, teachers master the material in teaching lessons or called support structures, and teachers make students interested in learning or on their own volition or called autonomy support Belmont, 2007). 1993). So that the support provided by the teacher makes students more involved in their lessons.
This study also has different findings from Ansong, Okumu, Bowen, Walker and Eisensmith (2017) that teacher support has no relationship with student engagement. Teacher support is not related to emotional and behavioral engagement, this happens because of differences in the use of teacher support theory and this study. In this study, the construct of teacher support was used in terms of fulfilling individual needs that affect student engagement (Fredrick, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004). Another thing can be caused by the measurement factor, namely self-measurement, which is explained by Ansong, Okumu, Bowen, Walker and Eisensmith (2017) in their research suggestions. Havik and Westergard (2019) stated that positive interaction between teachers and students is one way to increase student engagement. In the research of Havik and Westergard (2019), the emotional dimension of engagement is more influenced by the emotional support provided by the teacher. This is in accordance with the researcher's findings that the perception of teacher support is related to student engagement.
The results of this study indicate that the perception of teacher support is positively related to student engagement. This finding explains that the level of support that students receive from their teacher or what is called the perception of teacher support will affect the level of student engagement. This study is in line with previous research from (Wang and Ecless, 2013) which indicated that teachers are the key to student involvement in schools. This happens because it is the teacher who creates and designs learning situations in the classroom, invites students to interact in learning, so that students are more active in their learning.

Conclusion
Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that there is a positive relationship between perceptions of teacher support and student engagement in students of SMPN 4 Rengat Barat. The results of the Pearson product moment correlation analysis obtained r=0.456; p = 0.000 (p <0.001). This means that the level of perception of teacher support is related to the level of student engagement. The results showed that the perceived contribution of teacher support to student engagement was 20.7%, the remaining 79.3% was influenced by other variables. The teacher is expected to verify the students related to how the treatment has been done, whether there is something that makes students feel neglected or students feel more cared for. Teachers may evaluate how the teacher teaches whether it is in accordance with what students expect, and how students feel when studying with the teacher. Teachers are expected to evaluate with students or ask for feedback on the learning system that has been implemented so far, whether it is in accordance with what students want, and what students feel about the way you teach, how to pay attention, which will make students feel more cared for. and more involved in learning in the classroom.