Impact of Faculty Behaviors on Student-Faculty Rapport: A Multi-Institutional Study

This research paper describes the findings from a multi-institutional exploratory study investigating student perceptions of positive rapport-building faculty behaviors. Numerous studies have identified that professors who can establish strong and positive rapport with their students have an immediate and beneficial impact on students’ learning, attendance, engagement, motivation, and academic success, resulting in a positive long-term influence on retention. Building on previous work by Ozis and Winfree that ranked fifteen specific faculty behaviors fostering positive rapport at a single institution in the southwestern United States, this study includes perspectives from undergraduate and graduate engineering students across multiple institutions with different academic populations. The objectives of this study are twofold: first, to identify the faculty behaviors that have a higher potential for positive influence on rapport, and second, to determine whether, or the extent to which, demographics (e.g., gender, age, GPA) affect students’ perception of what constitutes positive student-faculty rapport. This study reports on students’ opinions across a diverse group of universities through a survey and recommends strategies for developing positive faculty-student rapport. Responses indicated that students value positive interpersonal behaviors such as respectfulness, understanding, kindness, and caring; professional behavior such as answering emails in a timely fashion; and beneficial pedagogical approaches such as conveying enthusiasm for the subject and providing relevant examples in class. The results of this work can be used broadly by faculty to enhance student learning and engagement through deliberate actions that develop positive rapport with students.