“An understanding heart is everything in a teacher and cannot be esteemed highly enough. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”

The lines are attributed to the psychologist Carl Jung and combine to make one of those shapely, comforting quotations that appeal strongly to commonsense and human tenderness without really getting down to business, scientifically speaking.

And yet, questions of heart and soul apart, a number of studies in the last twenty years support the gist of Jung’s claim. Students who have warm supportive relationships with their teachers tend to do better in school than children who don’t.

The studies themselves have tended to fall short by failing to establish just how these caring teachers breed achievement in their students. Additionally, the research has not taken account of the fact that the teacher-student relationship is a two-way street. Not only do teachers influence students; students affect their teachers. Well-behaved children might elicit more compassion.

A group of researchers from Texas A&M University in the US sought to fill these knowledge gaps in a recent study. They tracked the academic progress of 671 children from first to third grade. All of the children attended one of three schools in Texas and had performed poorly on a literacy test at the beginning of first grade. They also surveyed the children’s teachers annually to understand the types of relationships they had with their students.

The researchers found that children who experienced supportive relationships with their first grade teachers tended to try hard and not give up on school work in the second grade and, in turn, to do well on math and reading tests in the third grade.

The findings suggest that positive experiences with first grade teachers shape children’s engagement in learning, which leads to supportive relationships with subsequent teachers and higher levels of achievement. In short, the efforts of that Jungian understanding heart seem to have lasting effects.

• Summary of “Teacher-student support, effortful engagement, and achievement: A 3-year longitudinal study” by Jan N. Hughes, Wen Luo, Oi_Man Kwok, and Linda K. Loyd in Journal of Educational Psychology, February 2008, Volume 100, Issue 1, pp 1-14.