Teacher decisions are largely influenced by the judgments that they make regarding their students' states of mind. Thus, it is important for teachers to be accurate in their judgments. The current study investigated the teacher judgment accuracy of student perceptions of the teacher-student relationship. In a Western state of the United States, 40 teachers used a prediction form to predict how their 4th "“ 6th grade students would rate the closeness and the conflict of their teacher-student relationship via the Student Perception of Affective Relationship with Teacher Scale (SPARTS, Koomen & Jellesma, 2015). Students then took the survey, and teacher predictions and student reports were run through bivariate correlations and t-tests for analysis. Teacher predictions and student reports had a mean correlation coefficient of .31 for closeness and .39 for conflict. Nine of the 40 teachers had a negative correlation for closeness, conflict, or both, suggesting that a good percentage of teachers are fairly poor at judging how their students perceive their teacher-student relationship. Nonetheless, the t-tests confirmed that on average, teacher judgment accuracy was significantly better than random. The results of this study suggest that there is a need for intervention to help teachers become more accurate judges of how their students perceive the teacher-student relationship. As teacher judgments impact teacher decisions, accurate judgments of the student perceptions of the relationship might allow for teachers to make decisions that would more effectively nurture positive teacher-student relationships.

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The present study investigates the relative extent to which judgments of people’s behavior are influenced by “truth” (as measured by averaged observer-judgments) and by systematic bias (i.e., perceivers’ preexisting views of target persons). Using data from online questionnaires and laboratory sessions (N = 155), we demonstrate that self- and peer-judgments of people’s actual behavior in specific situations are somewhat accurate but are also affected by what perceivers thought of the targets before observing their behavior. The latter effect comprises a general evaluative component (generally positive or negative views of targets) and a content-specific component (views of targets in terms of specific characteristics, for example, “restrained”). We also found that friends, but not targets themselves, tend to judge targets’ behaviors more positively than unacquainted observers do. The relevance of these findings for person perception in everyday life and in research contexts is discussed.

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