Exploring the relationship between teachers’ disciplinary sanctions and students’ test anxiety in Chinese rural schools: A multilevel moderation analysis

School discipline is an integral part of educational systems. Its relationship with students’ test anxiety has attracted increasing interest among scholars. By fitting multilevel models on data from a sample of Grade 4 students from rural schools in central China, this study examined the association between teachers’ disciplinary sanctions and students’ test anxiety. The results showed that both appropriate and inappropriate disciplinary sanctions were positive and significant predictors of students’ test anxiety, and teacher–student relationships played a moderating role between disciplinary sanctions and test anxiety. These findings may be informative to school administrators as well as educators and practitioners in education systems, where the regulation of school discipline is still a challenge.