Basic psychological needs and school engagement: a focus on justice and agency

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationship between basic psychological needs and student engagement in a population of Italian secondary school students. To measure the psychological needs, we have selected a set of indicators that, beyond the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, also include the need for justice, which is crucial in adolescence when the degree of sensitivity to the ways people behave in interpersonal interactions is well developed. To measure student engagement, we have considered the four-dimensional structure of the construct, which has added the factor of agentic engagement to the three conventional dimensions of emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement. Participants were 640 secondary school Italian students aged 15-17. The results confirm that justice should be considered as an additional basic need in school settings, as it fosters intrinsic student motivation and engagement. Moreover, our findings provide evidence that agency is a dimension that enriches the construct of student engagement. In the conclusion, justice and agency are treated as constructs that deserve to be more deeply considered in future research into learning environments.

School Refusal and Absenteeism: Perception of Teacher Behaviors, Psychological Basic Needs, and Academic Achievement

“…Another result to emerge from this study was the role of satisfaction at school as a mediator between number of absences and perceived teacher support. This result, again consistent with other studies (Niemiec and Ryan, 2009; Yu et al, 2015; Malu and Reddy, 2016; Molinari and Mameli, 2018), suggests that when teachers pay attention to their students’ point of view, they support their need to feel free to choose, be competent, and be connected with others, thus increasing their involvement at school and reducing the number of absences.…”

School context and subjective distress: The influence of teacher justice and school-specific well-being on adolescents’ psychological health

“…In a study on students' perceptions of the classroom learning environment, Tas (2016) showed that justice (investigated here in terms of equity) has a positive effect on all the aspects of engagement, including the emotional one. In line with this study, Molinari and Mameli (2018) have shown that teacher justice has a positive effect on emotional engagement. A number of studies have ascertained the importance of emotional engagement for adolescent health as well.…”

“…In the 1960s Taylor (1962) claimed that, for students, justice is one of the most significant teacher qualities. More recently, some authors have put forward the idea that justice, in educational settings, should be conceived as a basic psychological need (Molinari & Mameli, 2018) which ought to be fulfilled to support students' intrinsic motivation, self-determination, and psychological growth.…”

Agency and responsibility in adolescent students: A challenge for the societies of tomorrow

“…We made use of the Italian translation (Molinari & Mameli, ) of the Activity Feeling State (AFS; Reeve & Sickenius, ; Reeve & Tseng, ), a 10‐item self‐report measure of perceived psychological need fulfilment. The instrument, starting with the stem ‘During class I feel…’, asks students to refer to their general perception of their own school experience.…”

“…There is no research, to our knowledge, that has explored the association between interpersonal justice and basic psychological needs. Only very recently, Molinari and Mameli () have advanced the argument that in school, as in other organizational contexts (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, ), justice should be considered as a condition sine qua non for the needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness to be satisfied. From our point of view, the main question researchers should address in future investigations is a theoretical one: Can students perceive that their basic needs are fully recognized in teacher–student relationships that are not connoted by a fair interpersonal treatment?…”