Rapport has been investigated in settings as diverse as roommate relationships, psychotherapist-client interactions, qualitative data collection, conflict resolution, business transactions and also in education. Consequently rapport is defined differently, not only between but inside different settings too. Unfortunately this applies also to higher education context. Here majority of researchers provide broad, imprecise definitions, derived from dictionaries, which refer to laic meaning and don't differ from general descriptions of good quality relationship. From such broad definitions, it's impossible to develop clear operationalisation and a reliable and valid instrument. To this day two such instruments were developed. The drawback of  Ryan, Wilson & Pugh's (2011) instrument is it includes professor's behaviours, which is problematic since we can't know a certain behaviour produces the same effects in diverse body of students. Frisby & Myers's (2008) instrument is even more problematic since they adopted Gremler & Gwinner's (2000) rapport scale, developed for customer-service provider interactions, simply by replacing the word "service provider" with "professor" and since two-factor structure found in original scale, wasn't confirmed in educational setting.

Scholars from this field report that rapport is positively related to numerous benefits for students: active participation (Fassinger, 1995), affective and cognitive learning, higher state motivation (Wilson, Ryan, Pugh, 2010), enjoyment of the course and content (Buskist & Saville, 2001), etc. Therefore rapport represents relevant factor in higher educational settings through enhancing student-oriented teaching, through establishing optimal socio-psychological environment.

In first stage an existing body of literature was revised to provide precise concept of student-professor rapport. New concept was developed based on model of Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal (1990) and relevant research findings. In short, we define rapport as interactive phenomena between professor and student as well as between professor and group of students. The quality of rapport can be assessed through various verbal and non-verbal cues (LaFrance, 1979; Bernieri, 1988) and also from interactants' subjective experience. We've focused on the latter. This insiders perspective is expressed through feelings and thoughts of interactants. Since professor acts as a leader of teaching process  it is him, who bears the responsibility for establishing it. In our conceptualisation we use same structural components as Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal (1990) do, but we modifiy them for higher educational context: mutual attention, positivity and coordination. Looking at existing concepts of rapport in higher education (Faranda, Clark 2004; Granitz, Koernig, Harich, 2009; Lowman, 1994; Wilson, Ryan, Pugh, 2010; Frisby and Martin, 2010) through the prism of aforementioned model, we see all elements of rapport can be related either to positivity and/or mutual attention, while coordination is almost entirely absent. In our view, it is exactly coordination that differentiates rapport from generaly good relationship and has eluded past definitions. By coordination we refer to smooth and properly relaxed interaction and to coordination in the process of teaching and learning, similar to working alliance.

The purpose of this study is to develop a reliable and valid questionnaire that will differentiate between different levels of student-professor rapport in higher education, based on the new concept of rapport, described above.

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