Abstract

Teacher decisions are largely influenced by the judgments that they make regarding their students' states of mind. Thus, it is important for teachers to be accurate in their judgments. The current study investigated the teacher judgment accuracy of student perceptions of the teacher-student relationship. In a Western state of the United States, 40 teachers used a prediction form to predict how their 4th "“ 6th grade students would rate the closeness and the conflict of their teacher-student relationship via the Student Perception of Affective Relationship with Teacher Scale (SPARTS, Koomen & Jellesma, 2015). Students then took the survey, and teacher predictions and student reports were run through bivariate correlations and t-tests for analysis. Teacher predictions and student reports had a mean correlation coefficient of .31 for closeness and .39 for conflict. Nine of the 40 teachers had a negative correlation for closeness, conflict, or both, suggesting that a good percentage of teachers are fairly poor at judging how their students perceive their teacher-student relationship. Nonetheless, the t-tests confirmed that on average, teacher judgment accuracy was significantly better than random. The results of this study suggest that there is a need for intervention to help teachers become more accurate judges of how their students perceive the teacher-student relationship. As teacher judgments impact teacher decisions, accurate judgments of the student perceptions of the relationship might allow for teachers to make decisions that would more effectively nurture positive teacher-student relationships.

Degree

MA

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Teacher Education

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2022-08-04

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12519

Keywords

teacher judgment, judgment accuracy, teacher-student relationships

Language

english

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