A Study on the Relationship between Trust Building Activities within Schools and Student Achievement

The purpose of this research was to determine the degree to which antecedents to trust impact teacher-administrator trust and to determine what impact that trust or a lack of trust had on student educational outcomes as mediated by school characteristics such as school type (elementary or secondary), percentage of minority students, and percentage of low socioeconomic students as measured by free and reduced lunch rates. A sample of 109 teachers and 46 administrators from 49 schools in rural school districts located throughout Southwest Tennessee participated in the study. Subjects completed an online version of the School Leader-Member Trust Survey which measured existence of trust and the frequency of trust-development activities occurring in the school based on the four trustee antecedents and the one trustor antecedent. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) testing revealed no statistically significant difference in teachers\u27 and administrators\u27 perceptions of the trust antecedents at the multivariate level. At the univariate level, however, statistically significant differences between administrators and teachers were observed for the four trust scales of benevolence, integrity, competence, and predictability. The second test, a multiple regression correlation, revealed moderate statistically sinificant relationships between all four constituent scales of the Leader-Member Trust Survey and the measure of propensity to trust for all 155 respondents, as well as for the administrator and teacher subgroups. Comparing the administrator and teacher subgroups, however, indicated no statistically significant difference. The next test run, an independent samples t-test, revealed no statistically significant difference in the means on AGI obtained for the low trust and high trust groups. Finally, a multiple regression test with added interactions was run. Using the Fisher r to z transformation, the correlations observed for each of these groups of schools was compared, but no difference in the strength of the correlations was found