Student Trust in Teacher Questionnaire: An Instrument for Measuring High School Students' Trust in English Teachers

Trust between students and school authorities has proven to yield significant advantages, including academic achievement, improvement in student behavior, and enhancement of the quality of classroom management. However, there is no reliable and valid instrument for the measurement of interpersonal trust in the educational context; therefore, the present study strived to fill this gap through devising a questionnaire to measure students' trust in English teachers. To that end, a 5-point Likert-scale Student Trust in Teacher Questionnaire was devised within a sample of 255 male and female high school students in several schools of Iran. Then it went through processes of reliability and validity examination of item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, omega coefficient analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis. Maximum likelihood factor analysis with a cut-off point of .40 and Kaiser's criterion of eigenvalues greater than 1 suggested a 4-factor solution as the best fit for the data. Analyses suggested the instrument’s acceptable reliability and validity for measuring students’ trust in their English teachers in terms of four teacher traits: pedagogical competence, individual consideration, trustworthiness, and situational professionalism. It bears mentioning that although the questionnaire was applied to English teachers in the current study, it is not confined to the context of language education. Thus, the findings of this study can be useful for all stakeholders in the education system, especially teachers to school principals and administrators.