Differentiations in motivation and need satisfaction based on course modality: a self-determination theory perspective

Online education has grown exponentially over the past two decades, in large part due to its promise of flexibility and connectivity for students. However, this approach to pedagogy has remained relatively unexamined in regard to issues of motivation and intellectual thriving. Using self-determination theory as a foundation, we assessed the degree to which course modality (namely online vs. face-to-face) led to psychological need satisfaction and quality motivation. Our survey of 240 (n = 240) college students confirmed previous research in which higher quality motivation predicted the satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness, which in turn predicted course and instructor approval. However, in a series of matched-pairs t-tests, students reported lower levels of quality motivation, autonomy support, competence and relatedness in online courses than they did for face-to-face courses.     

Effects of perceived autonomy support from social agents on motivation and engagement of Chinese primary school students: Psychological need satisfaction as mediator

Little research has simultaneously examined the differential effects of autonomy support from parents, teachers, and peers (social agents) on students’ psychological need satisfaction, motivation, and school engagement. Drawing from Self-Determination Theory, this study examined the joint effects of perceived autonomy support from these three social agents on psychological needs, motivation, and engagement of 614 Chinese primary school students. Results revealed that perceived autonomy support from parents, teachers, and peers positively and uniquely predicted student psychological need satisfaction. The effect was strongest for parental autonomy support, although a model constraining the paths from all three social agents to be equal fit equally well. Need satisfaction predicted greater self-determined motivation and student engagement and mediated the effects of all three social agents on student motivation and engagement. The model showed strong gender invariance. The results highlight the importance of targeting all three social agents in multi-level interventions that aim to optimize student motivation and school engagement.     

An empirical test of self-determination theory as a guide to fostering environmental motivation

A goal of most environmental education is to motivate students toward environmentally friendly behaviour change. This article describes a study that elucidates how such motivation can be fostered in the classroom. It compared students’ development of environmental motivation in a conventional post-secondary environmental biology course and a similar course guided by self-determination theory (SDT). Students in the SDT-guided course experienced less amotivation after the course than students in the comparison section. This article presents a preliminary empirical examination of the utility of SDT in a formal environmental education setting.     

When students show some initiative: Two experiments on the benefits of greater agentic engagement

Correlational and longitudinal research suggests that agentically-engaged students experience multiple educational benefits. Recognizing this, two experiments tested the causal capacity of manipulated agentic engagement to create three categories of benefits: a supportive learning environment; motivational satisfactions; and effective functioning (e.g., engagement, performance). Study 1 used the teacher–student laboratory paradigm to place 121 same-sex pairs of preservice teachers into the roles of teacher and student during a videotaped 12-min instructional episode. Teachers were randomly assigned to be autonomy supportive or not, while students were randomly assigned to be agentically engaged or not. MANOVAs on 10 self-reported and rater-scored dependent measures showed that manipulated agentic engagement enhanced both a supportive learning environment and greater motivational satisfaction but not more effective functioning. Study 2 used the same teacher-student paradigm to randomly assign 74 same-sex pairs into one of three conditions: agentic engagement to change the environment (as in Study 1); agentic engagement to change one's functioning (a new Study 2 manipulation); and a neutral control. The first manipulation again enhanced the supportive learning environment and motivational satisfaction but not effective functioning, while the second manipulation produced no benefits. Collectively, these findings confirm some limited causal benefits from agentic engagement and therefore provide guidance for future research, including the design and implementation of student-focused agentic engagement interventions.     

Students' Agentic Engagement Predicts Longitudinal Increases in Perceived Autonomy-Supportive Teaching: The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Recognizing that teachers' motivating styles predict students' classroom engagement, we investigated whether students' classroom engagement might predict a change in teachers' motivating styles, though we investigated only students' perceptions of these changes. Using a self-determination theory framework and a classroom-based longitudinal research design, 336 Peruvian university students self-reported their teachers' perceived autonomy-supportive teaching and four aspects of their own engagement (behavioral, emotional, agentic, and cognitive) at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of a semester. As expected, earlysemester perceived autonomy-supportive teaching predicted longitudinal increases in all four aspects of students' late-semester engagement. More importantly, students' early-semester agentic engagement predicted longitudinal increases in perceived autonomy-supportive teaching, which suggests that students' classroom engagement may recruit greater perceived autonomy support.     

Teacher expectation effects on need-supportive teaching,student motivation,and engagement: a self-determination perspective

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that teachers differentiate their behaviour based on their expectations of students. Self-determination theory (SDT) makes explicit how teacher behaviour relates to students’ motivation and engagement, namely, via need-supportive teaching. In the present study, we combined both research traditions and examined associations of teacher expectations with need-supportive teaching and thereby students’ motivation and engagement. Two-hundred-and-seventy-six secondary school students and their teachers (N?=?11) completed questionnaires. The results indicated that teacher expectations were moderately but positively associated with students’ intrinsic motivation and engagement, and negatively with amotivation. These relationships were fully mediated, although with small effect sizes, by need-supportive teaching. These findings highlight the value of combining research on teacher expectations and SDT, to gain further understanding of how teacher expectations may cause teachers to provide more need support to some students than to others, thereby affecting students’ motivation and engagement.     

How and why students make academic progress: Reconceptualizing the student engagement construct to increase its explanatory power

This paper sought to explain how the student engagement construct could be reconceptualized so to increase its capacity to explain course-specific academic progress.To do so, we proposed that agentic engagement should be added as a new engagement component while the status of emotional engagement should be reconsidered. In two longitudinally-designed studies, secondary-grade students self-reported four aspects of their course-specific classroom engagement (behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic) throughout an 18-week semester, and these scores were used to predict their objectively-scored course achievement (Study 1) and end-of-semester gains in perceived academic progress and perceived autonomy-supportive teaching (Study 2). In both studies, multilevel regressions showed that agentic engagement explained independent variance in the outcomes, while emotional engagement (and cognitive engagement) did not. These findings highlight the need to add agentic engagement and to reconceptualize the role of emotional engagement, so the discussion offers a reconceptualized model with greater explanatory power than its 3-component (behavioral, emotional, cognitive) predecessor.     

Effects of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention on the Perception of Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction among Special Education Students

Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) have been increasingly implemented in schools to foster better emotional regulation skills for students with special education needs such as learning disabilities (LDs). This pilot study aimed to evaluate the impact of a MBI on the need satisfaction of elementary students with severe LDs. A prospective quasi-experimental design involving one group and two time points was employed. A sample of 14 elementary school students from a severe LDs special education class participated in this project. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted and revealed a significant reduction in need satisfaction, with a large effect size (η² = .35). Contrary to our hypothesis, the MBI appeared to be negatively related to need satisfaction among participants. These results indicate that MBIs could be linked with better self-evaluation skills in students with severe LDs, which, in turn, may change (or increase the accuracy of) the perception that children have of their own need satisfaction.     

Experimental longitudinal test of the influence of autonomy-supportive teaching on motivation for participation in elementary school physical education

The present study examined the efficacy of autonomy-supportive teaching during elementary school physical education (PE) in influencing pupils’ enjoyment, fear of failure, boredom and effort. A sample of 54 pupils attending fifth and sixth grades comprised the control group (typical instruction; n = 27) and the experimental group (autonomy-supportive instruction; n = 27). Pupils’ responses were provided four times during a school trimester on perceived autonomy-support provided by the PE teacher, fulfilment of psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, behavioural regulations for PE participation, enjoyment, fear of failure, boredom and effort. In the autonomy-support condition, levels of the positive motivational indexes remained relatively stable during the trimester. Motivational deterioration was evident for the control group, and especially during the middle and the end of the trimester. Autonomy-supportive teaching leads to enhanced levels of motivation compared to non-autonomy-supportive teaching that may lead to gradual decline of motivation for PE participation.     

Teachers' motivation to teach national education in Singapore: a self-determination theory approach

The National Education (NE) programme was set up in Singapore schools in 1997 to inculcate a national identity and values in the younger generation. Teachers in schools are given the important role of developing a shared sense of nationhood among their students. However, no study has yet examined the motivations for teaching NE in schools. The purpose of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' motivations, perceptions of NE, perceived competence to teach NE and feelings on the NE programme provided in their teacher training course, using the cluster analysis method. The study involved 4242 pre-service teachers (1229 males, 2986 females, 27 missing information) from the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore. The results showed that 15.6% of the teachers belonged to a “high amotivation” cluster, 38.0% formed a “high externally regulated” cluster, 19.9% made up a cluster labelled as “low externally regulated”, and the rest (26.5%) had an “intrinsically regulated” profile. The four clusters showed significant gender and programme differences. In summary, the results from the cluster analysis supported the concurrent validity of the clusters in terms of pre-service teachers' perceptions of their involvement in NE activities, its importance, NE as government propaganda, competence to teach NE and satisfaction with the NE programme provided in their teacher training course.     

Why students become more engaged or more disengaged during the semester: A self-determination theory dual-process model

We adopted a dual-process model within a self-determination theory framework to investigate why students sometimes veer toward a longitudinal trajectory of rising classroom engagement during the semester and why they other times tend toward a trajectory of rising disengagement. Measures of perceived autonomy support, perceived teacher control, need satisfaction, need frustration, engagement, and disengagement were collected from 366 (174 females, 192 males) Korean high-school students using a three-wave longitudinal research design. Multi-level structural equation modeling analyses found that perceived autonomy support predicted longitudinal changes need satisfaction which predicted changes in engagement and also that perceived teacher control predicted longitudinal changes need frustration which predicted changes disengagement. Reciprocal effects also emerged in that extent of disengagement predicted both longitudinal increases in students' perceptions of teacher control and decreases in perceptions of teacher autonomy support. We conclude that students tend toward a semester-long trajectory of rising engagement when they perceive their teachers to be autonomy supportive and need satisfying while they tend toward a trajectory of rising disengagement when they perceive their teachers to be controlling and need frustrating.     

Personal and collective perceptions of social support: Implications for classroom engagement in early adolescence

The present study uses multilevel modeling to understand early adolescents’ individual and class-level perceptions of social support in relation to their behavioral and emotional engagement in math and science. To capture individual relationships, we examined students’ self-perceptions of classroom social satisfaction, best friend quality, and teacher-student relatedness. Between classrooms, we considered collective perceptions of peer and teacher support. Participants were 761 fifth (n = 412) and sixth grade (n = 349) students nested within 44 classrooms who were 52% female and ethnically diverse. Results indicated that both peer and teacher relationships are important for early adolescents’ behavioral engagement, but teachers play a primary role in shaping emotional engagement toward subject-area content. Moreover, both individual and classroom-level indicators of perceived support explained variation in children’s engagement outcomes, highlighting the complex nature of classroom social relationships that necessitate teachers’ consideration.     

Patterns of boredom and its relationship with perceived autonomy support and engagement

The impact of academic boredom on learning and achievement has received increasing attention in the literature; however, the questions of how academic boredom changes over time and how the change relates to antecedents of boredom and student engagement during a course of study remain unexplored. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to: (a) examine the patterns of change in two types of academic boredom (i.e., learning-related and class-related) and in four types of student engagement (i.e., vigor, absorption, dedication, and effort regulation); (b) to examine how the trajectories of boredom and student engagement relate to one another; and (c) to investigate the relationship between perceived autonomy support and the pattern of change in boredom, in a sample of 144 university students. Results of latent growth curve analysis showed that learning-related boredom, vigor, and absorption remained relatively stable over time, whereas both class-related boredom and effort regulation showed a linear change, a pattern of increase and a trend of decrease, respectively. Interestingly, students’ dedication decreased at the beginning and increased when approaching the end of the course. Our results also revealed the fact that changes in boredom in class were linked with changes in both effort regulation and dedication, and the inverse association between perceived autonomy support and class-related boredom experience.     

Testing a circular,feedback model in physical education from self-determination theory

Self-determination theory has emerged as one of the most important theoretical frameworks to explain motivation in the context of physical education within school systems. The authors propose a new circular, longitudinal, feedback model to complement Vallerand’s (1997 Vallerand, R. J. (1997). Toward a hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 271–360). New York: Academic Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) hierarchical model. To test this new approach, Epstein’s TARGET strategies (Epstein, 1988 Epstein, J. (1988). Effective schools or effective students? Dealing with diversity. In R. Haskins &; B. MacRae (Eds.) Policies for America's public schools (pp. 89–126). Norwood, NJ, Ablex. [Google Scholar]) were applied to 207 secondary education students. Moreover, the satisfaction of the basic psychological need for competence (C), intrinsic motivation (IM), and effort (E) were measured at nine time points (C1 → IM2 → E3 → C4 → IM5 → E6 → C7 → IM8 → E9). Structural equation modeling showed that the proposed model provided a satisfactory fit of the data, Satorra-Bentler χ²(22) = 36.31, p = .028, robust comparative fit index = .985, robust root mean square error of approximation = .056 (90% CI [.019, .088]), standardized root mean square residual = .039, power = 1.00. It was also observed that all variables increased progressively, suggesting interplay among them. This shows a concurrent causal relationship among these variables that produces a synergistic effect.     

父母自主支持对流动儿童学习投入的影响:基本心理需要的中介作用

采用父母自主支持、 学习投入和基本心理需要量表对475名公办学校流动儿童进行测评,探讨流动儿童感知到的父母自主支持、基本心理需要与学习投入之间的关系.结果发现:父母自主支持对流动儿童学习投入有正向预测作用,基本心理需要正向预测流动儿童学习投入;基本心理需要在父母自主支持和流动儿童学习投入之间起部分中介作用.提高流动儿童...     

It's more about a lesson than a domain: Lesson-specific autonomy support,motivation, and engagement in math and a second language

Expanding research on the relative impact of different autonomy-supportive strategies employed by teachers across domains, the present study investigated the variation in 4 lesson-specific autonomy-supportive strategies (providing choices, rationales, accepting frustration, and stimulating interests) and 6 aspects of students' motivation and engagement in 2 domains with a repeated measurement design. For 3 weeks, 202 Dutch students from 8 eighth grade classes and 1 ninth-grade class and 12 teachers completed lesson-specific measures at the end of Math and German lessons. Students' perceptions of teachers' autonomy support and their motivation and engagement varied considerably across lessons within a domain (variance at the within-student level ranged from 19% to 51%). In random intercept-random slope models, we found that all autonomy-supportive strategies showed meaningful associations with aspects of students’ motivation and engagement. We did not find substantial domain-dependency in the associations between autonomy support and the outcomes.     

Promoting elementary school students' autonomous reading motivation: Effects of a teacher professional development workshop

Responding to the declining trend in reading motivation in and beyond the elementary school years, the authors aimed to enhance late-elementary school students' autonomous reading motivation. Toward this end, the authors evaluated the influence of a teacher professional development grounded in self-determination theory on fifth-grade students' (n = 664) autonomous motivation for in-school and leisure-time reading. A quasi-experimental repeated measures design was set up with experimental and control conditions. The experimental condition consisted of teachers participating in a professional development workshop aimed at providing the knowledge and skills necessary to implement an autonomy-supportive and structuring teaching style, whereas the control condition included teachers who continued with their current teaching repertoire. Multilevel piece-wise growth analyses corroborated that students in the experimental group reported increased recreational autonomous reading motivation from pretest to posttest relative to the control group. Additional analyses made clear that boys in particular benefitted from their teachers' professional development.     

教师自主支持:西方的研究及其启示

教师的自主支持即教师支持学生的自主性。西方对教师自主支持的研究已有30年的历史,主要集中于教师自主支持的内涵、影响因素与测量,以及积极功效与作用机制三个方面。随着时间的推移和近年来西方积极心理学运动的开展,各方面研究不断地深入和细化,得出了一些重要的结论。其系列研究成果对我国的教育教学和自立研究的开展也有重要的参考价值。     

The application of self-determination theory to support students experiencing disaffection

This paper provides a rationale for educational psychologists (EPs) to consider the concept of disaffection systemically. In order to understand how contextual and interactional factors initiate or maintain disaffection it may be useful for EPs to draw upon self-determination theory (SDT). This theory emphasises how contextual factors determine the extent to which a student’s psychological needs – for autonomy, competence and relatedness – are met. It is hypothesised that students are more likely to disengage from school if this context does not meet these psychological needs. SDT may, therefore, assist EPs in understanding disaffection and suggest constructive changes to the student’s environment. In view of this, two approaches are suggested concerning the role of EPs: (1) the use of person-centred thinking, with students and teachers, to enhance student perceptions of autonomy, competence and relatedness; (2) the use of effective consultation to engage teachers in the process of systemic change.     

物质主义与幸福感:基于自我决定理论的关系探析

物质主义是个体根据自身拥有的物质财产的数量和质量来界定自我概念及成功与否的一种价值观念,通常反映在对物质财富的看重程度上。自我决定理论认为,自主性、能力感和归属感这三种基本心理需要是否满足从根本上决定着幸福感能否产生。物质主义者在追求物质财富的过程中,更倾向于体验到较高的外控感,有意回避生活中的消极体验、消极事件;害怕他人消极评价,倾向于采用防御性自我呈现策略;对物质财物的看重程度远远超过对人际关系的重视程度,知觉到较低的社会支持,因而其自主性、能力感和归属感未能得到适度满足,由此体验到较低的幸福感。营造富有安全感的成长环境、关注经由基本心理需要满足带来的真实幸福和培养感恩等将有助于抵制物质主义及其对幸福感的危害。