As usual I don't think much of the actual research (the data set consist of psychology students at a midwestern university, and the result evaluated is effect on GPA). But the concept of the 'working alliance' is intriguing. "In his 1979 paper, Bordin argued that a working alliance occurs when one person makes an effort to change and another person serves as a facilitator of that change." The purpose of the current paper (18 page PDF) is to "was to develop a theoretically grounded and psychometrically sound instrument for measuring students' perceptions of the working alliance they experience with their teacher." They worked their way from 93 content-valid measures drawn from the literature to a set of 18 statistically relevant items divided into three major categories: collaborative bond, teacher competence, and student investment. See also Rogers's 2009 paper 'The Working Alliance in Teaching and Learning: Theoretical Clarity and Research Implications'.
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