Investigating dimensions of instructor trust using the words of undergraduate STEM students

Introduction Recent work has shown that student trust in their instructor is a key moderator of STEM student buy-in to evidence-based teaching practices (EBTs), enhancing positive student outcomes such as performance, engagement, and persistence. Although trust in instructor has been previously operationalized in related settings, a systematic classification of how undergraduate STEM students perceive trustworthiness in their instructors remains to be developed. Moreover, previous operationalizations impose a structure that often includes distinct domains, such as cognitive and affective trust, that have yet to be empirically tested in the undergraduate STEM context. Methods To address this gap, we engage in a multi-step qualitative approach to unify existing definitions of trust from the literature and analyze structured interviews with 57 students enrolled in undergraduate STEM classes who were asked to describe a trusted instructor. Through thematic analysis, we propose that characteristics of a trustworthy instructor can be classified into three domains. We then assess the validity of the three-domain model both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, we examine student responses to determine how traits from different domains are mentioned together. Second, we use a process-model approach to instrument design that leverages our qualitative interview codebook to develop a survey that measures student trust. We performed an exploratory factor analysis on survey responses to quantitatively test the construct validity of our proposed three-domain trust model. Results and discussion We identified 28 instructor traits that students perceived as trustworthy, categorized into cognitive, affective, and relational domains. Within student responses, we found that there was a high degree of interconnectedness between traits in the cognitive and relational domains. When we assessed the construct validity of the three-factor model using survey responses, we found that a three-factor model did not adequately capture the underlying latent structure. Our findings align with recent calls to both closely examine long-held assumptions of trust dimensionality and to develop context-specific trust measurements. The work presented here can inform the development of a reliable measure of student trust within undergraduate STEM student environments and ultimately improve our understanding of how instructors can best leverage the effectiveness of EBTs for positive student learning outcomes.