Instructor-Student Relationship Experiment: Data Package

Summary:  View help for Summary These files contain the anonymized data and analysis files used to create the results found in "Taking It to the Next Level: A Field Experiment to Improve Instructor-Student Relationships in College." The paper can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332858419839707

The paper's abstract:
Competing in today’s workforce increasingly requires earning a college degree, yet almost half of all enrolled undergraduates do not graduate. As the costs of dropping out of college continue to rise, instructor-student relationships may be a critical yet underexplored avenue for improving college student outcomes. The present study attempts to replicate and extend a prior study that improved teacher-student relationships at the high school level in a college setting. In this registered report, we test whether an intervention that highlights instructor-student commonalities improves similarity, instructor-student relationships, academic achievement, and persistence for undergraduate students in a large, diverse public university. We found that the intervention increased perceptions of similarity but not downstream relational or academic outcomes. Our exploratory analyses provide one of the first investigations suggesting that instructor-student relationships predict an array of consequential student outcomes in college. These findings show a notable relationship gap: instructors perceived less positive relationships with certain student groups, but on average, students perceived equally positive relationships with their instructors.

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms Instructor-student relationships; College; Similarity; Experiment

Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 9/1/2016 – 12/31/2018 (Experiment conducted in Spring 2017)

Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) administrative records data; survey data