Teacher relationship skills and student learning

Abstract

Despite extensive evidence on variation in teacher value-added, we have a limited understanding of why some teachers are more effective in promoting human capital than others. Using rich, high-quality data from Norway, we introduce and validate a new approach to measuring teachers’ overall capacity to form positive relationships in the classroom, relying on student survey items previously developed and validated (at the student level) in the education literature. We denote this measure as teacher relationship skills. We find that teacher relationship skills are highly stable over time. Furthermore, there is not only substantial variation in teacher quality, as measured by students’ learning outcomes conditional on past achievement, but also in teacher relationship skills, even within the same school. Finally, by relying on as-good-as random assignment of students to classes, we show that teacher relationship skills affect student learning.