BackgroundStudents’ mastery goals are positively related to adaptive learning behaviour. Moreover, these goals often mediate the relation between perceived classroom characteristics and academic achievement. Research generally shows a decline of academic achievement and mastery goals after transition to middle school. Creating a learning environment at middle school according to students’ basic needs for autonomy, competence, and social relatedness might help to reduce these declines. However, little is known about the relationship between perceived fulfilment of needs, mastery goals, and academic achievement.AimsWe investigate the relationship between indicators of students’ perceived fulfilment of needs and their graded performance to determine whether the connection is indirect via mastery goals.SampleWe surveyed 2,105 students during the first year in middle school.MethodsWe assessed the amount of the students’ perceived autonomy, recognition of competence and support from the teacher (as indicators of competence and social relatedness) in class, their mastery goals, and their grades. Multilevel models were calculated.ResultsPerceived fulfilment of needs correlated significantly with mastery goals and graded performance. Mastery goals predicted graded performance; however, when perceived fulfilment of needs and mastery goals were analysed simultaneously, the correlation between mastery goals and graded performance was no longer significant. There was no indirect relation between perceived fulfilment of needs and graded performance via mastery goals.ConclusionsResults indicate that creating the learning environment according to the students’ basic needs is positively related to their mastery goals and graded performance during the first year at middle school.

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Based on Honneth's recognition theory, this study aimed at investigating whether students with a migration background reported receiving less recognition from teachers than students without a migration background. Also, we explored whether such a difference contributed to explaining the disparity between the groups in reading achievement. To answer these research questions, we used data from a German study on school quality (STEG-S; n = 2105 students), and from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA; n = 6504 students). The results show that, indeed, students with a migration background experienced less recognition from teachers in terms of cognitive respect. Students reporting lower levels of cognitive respect from reading teachers further achieved poorer outcomes in the reading test at the end of the first term of grade 5, controlling for test results at the beginning of the term. Accordingly, cognitive respect from the reading teacher mediated the effect of the migration background on reading achievement. These effects were small but might accumulate over time. Hence, recognition in the classroom appears to be one piece of the puzzle for understanding how educational disadvantages persist and are reproduced for students with a migration background.