The composition of the obtained subscale.

Epistemic trust (ET) is a well-established concept in evolutionary developmental psychology. It refers to the trust recipients place in their informants, which in turn makes them more attentive, thoughtful, and engaged in processing and acquiring information. This concept plays a key role in educational contexts, as leveraging this innate mechanism could help teachers to improve learning outcomes, including those beyond the classroom. This paper describes the development and validation of a new self-report measure, the Epistemic Trust Towards Teacher (ETT) scale, designed to assess the unique role of ET in education. The study focuses on the development of the scale, its factor structure, and construct validity. The study participants were 224 middle and high school students aged 11–15 (58.5% female). Confirmatory factor analysis supported a three-factor structure with good model fit (χ²/df = 1.9; CFI = 0.970; TLI = 0.965; RMSEA = 0.062), consisting of Trust (ETT_T), Mistrust (ETT_M), and Generalisation (ETT_G) subscales. Reliability was acceptable to excellent across the three subscales (Cronbach’s α = .75–.88). The factors showed good discriminant validity and aligned with theoretical expectations. The ETT scales correlated in theoretically consistent ways with established measures of teacher-student relationship quality, working alliance, non-verbal immediacy, and student motivation. Overall, this study provides preliminary support for the ETT as a relevant and psychometrically sound instrument in the field of educational psychology. Further research is required to investigate the ETT’s performance across a wider age range and diverse educational settings.

认知信任（Epistemic trust，ET）是进化发展心理学中得到广泛验证的概念。该概念指信息接收者对信息传递者的信任，这种信任会促使接收者更加专注投入、审慎思考，并积极处理与获取信息。这一概念在教育场景中发挥着关键作用，借助这一天生认知机制，教师可有效提升学习效果，甚至可惠及课堂之外的学习活动。本研究介绍了一款全新的自我报告式测量工具——针对教师的认知信任量表（Epistemic Trust Towards Teacher，ETT）的开发与验证过程，该量表旨在评估认知信任在教育场景中的独特作用。本研究重点阐述了该量表的开发过程、因素结构以及结构效度。本研究的被试为224名年龄在11至15岁的初高中学生，其中女生占比58.5%。验证性因素分析（Confirmatory factor analysis）结果显示，该量表符合三因素结构，且模型拟合效果良好（χ²/df=1.9；比较拟合指数CFI=0.970；塔克-刘易斯指数TLI=0.965；近似误差均方根RMSEA=0.062），该量表包含信任（Trust，ETT_T）、不信任（Mistrust，ETT_M）与泛化性（Generalisation，ETT_G）三个分量表。三个分量表的信度均处于可接受至优秀区间，克朗巴赫α系数（Cronbach’s α）为0.75~0.88。各因素均表现出良好的区分效度，且与理论预期高度契合。ETT量表得分与已有的师生关系质量、工作联盟、非语言即时性以及学生学习动机等成熟测量工具的得分呈现出符合理论逻辑的相关关系。总体而言，本研究为ETT量表作为教育心理学领域兼具相关性与心理测量学科学性的工具提供了初步实证支持。未来仍需开展进一步研究，以探索ETT量表在更广年龄区间与多样化教育场景中的应用表现。