The relationships among teacher characteristics, student learning, and teacher evaluation.

The past several decades have witnessed an increasing concern with the role of communication in the instructional environment. The primary purpose of this research was to identify the specific teacher characteristics or behavior patterns which communicate caring to students and to identify those teacher characteristics or misbehaviors that disrupt the students\u27 perceptions of caring. This investigation demonstrated that teacher immediacy and the teacher traits of socio-communicator style (e.g., assertiveness and responsiveness) and tolerance for disagreement have a significant, positive relationships with students\u27 perceptions of teacher caring, learning outcomes, and the way students evaluate those teachers. Respondents in the study were 249 students (142 males and 107 females) enrolled in Communication classes at a large mid-Atlantic university. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. The target teachers were those the participants had in the class they took immediately prior to the class in which the data were collected. Data were collected during regularly scheduled classroom periods, approximately 12 weeks into the semester. Within any learning situation, disagreements about ideas or opinions are inevitable. This document also reports the development of a Teacher Tolerance for Disagreement measure (the TTFD instrument). This document reviews the evolution of the Tolerance for Disagreement construct and previous efforts with reference to measurement. In this study, a 20-item version of a TTFD instrument was found to be unidimensional, reliable, and able to demonstrate good discriminant validity. Students\u27 perceptions of their teachers\u27 caring was found to be positively related to their perceptions of their teachers\u27 tolerance for disagreement, immediacy, responsiveness, and assertiveness while negatively related to teacher verbal aggressiveness. Teacher immediacy, responsiveness, assertiveness, tolerance for disagreement, and verbal aggressiveness all contributed a significant amount of variance to teacher evaluation, student learning, and student perceived teacher caring. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed