The research, conducted by Dake Lin of Wenzhou University and SEGi University, surveyed 456 first-year undergraduates drawn from all 16 schools of a provincial university in Zhejiang Province, China. Every participant had completed the mandatory undergraduate entrepreneurship course that Chinese universities require of all students, regardless of their major. The sample spanned humanities and social sciences, engineering and technical sciences, and natural sciences, with students coming from more than 30 provinces and municipalities. Data were collected between January and May 2024 through an online questionnaire distributed via WeChat groups, and every one of the 456 eligible students invited ultimately completed the survey.

The study focused on three psychological constructs. Perceived quality of teaching, or PQT, captures how students evaluate instructional clarity, course organization, responsiveness to feedback, and pedagogical effectiveness. Student course engagement, or SCEn, reflects the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive investment that learners make in their coursework, from participation in class discussions to emotional connection with the material. Teacher interpersonal behaviour, or IB, describes the relational climate of the classroom, including whether instructors support or thwart students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. All three were measured with validated questionnaires adapted for the entrepreneurship context, translated into Chinese and back-translated into English to ensure cross-cultural equivalence.

The analytical approach was rigorous. Lin employed partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique well suited to prediction-oriented research and to models containing latent interaction terms. Before the main study, a panel of five entrepreneurship experts rated every questionnaire item using the content validity ratio, and a pilot test with 127 first-year students confirmed that all scales exceeded the conventional reliability threshold of 0.70. Items with negative content validity scores were removed, and further items with weak statistical loadings were screened out during measurement-model assessment, leaving a refined instrument whose reliability coefficients ranged from 0.936 to 0.959 in the final sample.

The headline result is striking. Perceived quality of teaching showed a substantial positive association with student course engagement, with a standardized path coefficient of 0.516 and a p-value below 0.001. Teacher interpersonal behaviour was independently associated with engagement as well, at 0.403. Together, the full model explained 70.8 percent of the variance in student engagement, an unusually high figure for educational research, though the author cautions that shared-source bias, in which the same students rate both the predictors and the outcome, may have inflated these associations. Descriptive statistics painted an encouraging picture: all three constructs averaged close to 4.0 on a five-point scale, suggesting that most students experienced supportive teaching and felt reasonably engaged.

The most theoretically interesting finding concerns moderation. Lin hypothesized that teacher interpersonal behaviour would not merely add to the effect of teaching quality but would change how strongly teaching quality translates into engagement. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, which holds that engagement flourishes when classroom environments satisfy students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, the study predicted that autonomy-supportive instructors would amplify the motivational value of well-designed instruction. The data confirmed this prediction: the interaction between perceived teaching quality and interpersonal behaviour was statistically significant, with a coefficient of 0.068 and a p-value of 0.038.

But the author is refreshingly candid about the size of that effect. The interaction explained only an additional 0.8 percent of variance beyond the main effects, and its effect size of 0.030 falls into the small category by conventional benchmarks. Simple slope analysis illustrated the pattern: among students who perceived low interpersonal support, the slope linking teaching quality to engagement was 0.335, while among those perceiving high support it rose to 0.471. In other words, supportive teacher behaviour modestly strengthens the payoff of good teaching, but the main effects of instructional quality and interpersonal warmth are far more influential than their interaction. For educators, the practical message is that neither dimension can compensate for the absence of the other.

The context matters. Prior studies have documented relatively low engagement in compulsory entrepreneurship courses at Chinese universities, where many students perceive the subject as less rigorous or relevant than traditional disciplines and view entrepreneurship as a last-resort career option rather than a proactive choice. The problem is compounded by staffing practices: many instructors of these mandatory courses lack dedicated entrepreneurship training or practical entrepreneurial experience, and rapid policy expansion has outpaced faculty development. Weak course organization, limited interaction, and one-way communication have all been identified as contributors to classroom inattention and surface learning. Against this backdrop, the finding that teaching quality is such a strong correlate of engagement carries real weight.

The study also situates itself within a distinctive cultural setting. Chinese classrooms traditionally feature hierarchical teacher-student relationships and directive pedagogies, which can conflict with the autonomy-supportive orientation that entrepreneurial learning demands. Entrepreneurship education inherently involves uncertainty, experimentation, collaborative problem-solving, and idea pitching, activities that heighten students’ psychological need for supportive rather than controlling instructor behaviour. The author suggests that faculty development programs should therefore move beyond technical pedagogy and explicitly address interpersonal competencies, including autonomy-supportive communication, constructive feedback, and relational sensitivity, particularly for instructors teaching large compulsory classes to heterogeneous first-year cohorts.

Like all research, the study has limitations that the author acknowledges openly. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causation, and it remains possible that engaged students simply rate their teachers more favorably. The single-institution sample limits generalizability to other types of universities, formal measurement invariance testing was not performed, and the dataset lacked the identifiers needed to account for students being nested within shared classes and instructors, a nesting that could underestimate standard errors. The Interpersonal Behaviour Questionnaire was also aggregated into a single score, obscuring whether supportive and thwarting behaviours play different moderating roles. Future research, Lin suggests, should adopt longitudinal designs, multi-source data such as classroom observations, and multilevel modelling. Still, the core message stands: in the classrooms where China’s next generation of entrepreneurs is being formed, what students perceive in their teachers, both the quality of the instruction and the warmth of the relationship, goes a long way toward determining whether they lean in or tune out.

Subject of Research: The relationship between perceived teaching quality, teacher interpersonal behaviour, and student course engagement in compulsory entrepreneurship education among Chinese first-year undergraduates

Article Title: Perceived quality of teaching and course engagement in entrepreneurship education: the moderating role of teacher interpersonal behaviour among first-year undergraduates at a Chinese university

Article References: Lin, D. (2026). Perceived quality of teaching and course engagement in entrepreneurship education: the moderating role of teacher interpersonal behaviour among first-year undergraduates at a Chinese university. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1936338. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1936338

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1936338

Keywords: entrepreneurship education, student engagement, teaching quality, teacher interpersonal behaviour, Self-Determination Theory, PLS-SEM, Chinese higher education, first-year undergraduates, classroom climate, faculty development, educational psychology, moderation analysis