Trust is omnipresent in our daily lives. We rely on trust when asking a friend to babysit, a neighbor to take care of a pet, or a co-worker to finish a task on time. When students ask their instructor, “Is this going to be on the test?” what underlies this may be: “Do we trust you enough to believe that what you are teaching us now will be part of the exam next week?” Previous work has shown that personal connections between students and instructors can improve a range of learning outcomes, such as motivation to engage (Komarraju et al., 2010) and self-efficacy (Ballen et al., 2017). Trust between students and instructors may be a key step in developing these personal connections, particularly in classrooms utilizing evidence-based teaching practices (EBPs) that feature frequent student-instructor interactions (Freeman et al., 2007). Indeed, our recent work shows that student trust is significantly positively associated with greater engagement, course performance, and intent to persist in STEM, mediated by students’ commitment to engage in, or “buy-in'' to, EBPs (Cavanagh et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2021). The promise of these findings warrants a more thorough investigation of how college students develop trust in an instructor. Though there is a body of research defining trust in K-12 settings (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2000), there is a comparatively extant literature on the nature of student trust in higher education and existing measures of student-instructor trust lack consensus on an operationalization of student trust in the college STEM environment (Hagenaeur & Volet, 2014). In our current study, we seek to operationally define and reliably measure undergraduate students’ trust in their instructor by first conducting interviews with 57 students enrolled in large STEM classrooms - of whom more than half self-identified as members of historically marginalized groups. Students were asked to identify instructor characteristics associated with building trust and the resulting codebook served as the foundation for developing a Trust and Responsiveness in Undergraduate STEM Teaching (TRUST) instrument. In this presentation, we will share insights into students’ perceptions of trust gained from our investigation, including the most prevalent instructor characteristics associated with building trust across students from different demographic groups and different classroom contexts.

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