Teacher-student relationships: The positives and negatives of assessing both perspectives

Although teacher-student relationships (TSRs) lie at the heart of teaching and learning, measuring these relationships presents unique challenges. These challenges implicate how school leaders understand the connections between TSRs and student outcomes. This article addresses these challenges by describing a new approach to measuring TSRs centered around a new scale that measures the positive and negative aspects of the overall TSR from teachers' and students' perspectives. We describe the scale development process, document the measure's psychometric properties, and then use the scale to predict student outcomes. Drawing from a sample of middle and high school students (N = 595) and their teachers (N = 88) in four different schools, we found that a two-factor model best fits our items. Compared to a more traditional approach, our approach explains more variability in student outcomes and gives educators a sharper understanding of the patterning of associations between TSRs and student outcomes.