Assessing valence and discordance between teachers' and students' perceptions of their relationships with each other

Previous research has established that teacher-student relationships (TSRs) play an important role in students' academic achievement, motivation, and social-emotional development. However, despite the reciprocal nature of TSRs, studies often assess these relationships from either the teacher or the student perspective rather than from both. In addition, research on TSRs tends to focus solely on how positive or negative these relationships are (TSR valence), without examining the degree to which teachers' and students' perceptions differ (TSR discordance). To begin addressing these gaps in the literature, my dissertation consists of three papers focused on assessing valence and discordance within dyadic TSRs in secondary schools. In the first study, a rigorous survey design process was used to develop of a scale to assess TSRs from both teachers' and students' perspectives. The scale was utilized with a sample of middle and high school students (N = 595) and their teachers (N = 88) from four different schools. The results indicated that a two-factor model provided the best fit for the TSR Scale. In my second study, the TSR Scale was used with a sample of 121 teachers and 665 students from five schools to examine the power of TSR discordance to predict students' academic achievement, behaviors, motivation and affect, after accounting for the TSR valence. The results of this study indicated that TSR valence and discordance significantly predicted important student outcomes, suggesting that incorporating both teachers' and students' perspectives as well as the degree of mismatch between them provides important information about student-teacher interactions.

The final study of my dissertation focused on identifying predictors of TSR discordance. Examining data from the same sample of 121 teachers and 665 students from five schools, structural equation modeling was used to explore links between TSR discordance and three sets of predictors (individual demographic characteristics, teacher-student ethnic- and gender-match, and teachers' and students' social perspective taking accuracy and motivation). The findings indicated that, while certain individual and match characteristics were statistically significant predictors of discordance, the malleable social perspective taking factors accounted for more unique variance in discordance than any other predictors.