Daily autonomy supporting or thwarting and students’ motivation and engagement in the high school science classroom.

Abstract

This diary study provided the first classroom-based empirical test of the relations between student perceptions of high school science teachers' various autonomy supporting and thwarting practices and students' motivation and engagement on a daily basis over the course of an instructional unit. Perceived autonomy supporting practices were hypothesized to predict autonomous motivation and engagement outcomes, while perceived autonomy thwarting practices were hypothesized to predict controlled motivation and disaffection outcomes. In line with this prediction, multilevel modeling results based on regular reports of 208 high school students in 41 science classes across 6 weeks suggested that 4 perceived daily supports (choice provision, consideration for student preferences and interests, rationales for importance, and question opportunities) and 1 daily thwart (use of uninteresting activities) predicted changes in daily autonomous motivation and engagement. In contrast, changes in students' daily controlled motivation and disaffection were predicted primarily by 3 perceived daily thwarts (controlling messages, suppression of student perspectives, and use of uninteresting activities). Results also suggested that practices interacted such that the perception of thwarts generally bolstered desirable daily relationships between perceived supports and students' motivation and the perception of supports generally mitigated undesirable daily relationships between thwarts and motivation. Supplemental exploratory results suggested that the effects of choice and suppression of student perspectives may be heterogeneous and depend on the outcome and/or the presence of other practices. Implications of the findings are discussed. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe results of a 6-week classroom-based diary study with 208 high school students in 41 science classes suggested that students' autonomous motivation and engagement increased (since the prior class day) on days when students perceived their teachers to support their autonomy by providing choices, considering their preferences and interests in course activities, communicating rationales for the importance of activities, providing opportunities to ask questions, or avoiding uninteresting activities. In contrast, controlled motivation and disaffection increased on days when students' perceived their teachers to thwart their autonomy by using controlling messages, suppressing student perspectives, or using uninteresting activities. Students' perceptions that teachers' used thwarting practices simultaneously with supportive practices bolstered the desirable relationship between perceived supports and motivation, and mitigated the undesirable relationship between thwarts and motivation. Results suggest the importance of focusing motivation interventions on training high school teachers to implement specific daily practices geared at supporting students' experience of autonomy and minimizing the use of specific thwarting practices to both promote autonomous motivat...

Trust and Discipline: Adolescents’ Institutional and Teacher Trust Predict Classroom Behavioral Engagement following Teacher Discipline

“…To better isolate the effect of prior day discipline on next day behavioral engagement, a comprehensive list of day‐level covariates was included in our analyses: (a) prior day behavioral engagement to account for adolescents’ behavior the prior day; (b) prior day perceptions of teacher fairness , i.e., “In general, how fair did your math teacher treat you today?” These responses were on a 5‐point Likert scale ranging from 1 ( very unfair ) to 5 ( very fair ) to account for potential qualitative differences in teacher discipline; (c) the number of academic tasks (i.e., reviewed homework, worksheet, quiz, or test) that students received feedback on that day to account for daily contextual factors that may contribute to misbehavior and discipline; (d) the day of the study to account for potential time and fatigue effects of study participation (see Patall et al., ); and (e) lag time between assessments (1 = > 1 day lag [for Mondays or day after a school holiday], 0 = 1 day lag ) to account for variation in lag times due to the 2 weekends and one school holiday occurring during the study.…”

Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions

“…Initially, autonomy support and control were assessed along a single dimension (e.g., Deci et al 1981), yet, over the years, the practice of control was increasingly studied in its own right (e.g., Assor et al 2005). Parallel to the differentiation between need satisfaction and need frustration, an increasing number of studies have explored the unique and independent contributions of autonomy-supportive and controlling styles (e.g., Bartholomew et al 2011;Bhavsar et al 2019;Haerens et al 2018;Patall et al 2018).…”

“…Similarly, what a PE teacher says and does to support students' autonomy (Haerens et al 2013) may not be identical to what science teachers do (Patall et al 2018). Observation tools thus need to capture these sometimes subtle differences to be ecologically valid and to maximize the probability of establishing predictive validity.…”

Gender disparities in students’ motivational experiences in high school science classrooms

“…Such teachers attempt to structure course activities around students’ interests, but when that is impossible, they provide meaningful rationales to explain the usefulness or importance of “boring” course activities (see Patall, Vasquez, Steingut, Trimble, & Pituch, ; Reeve, ; Reeve & Jang, ; Su & Reeve, for a review of autonomy‐supportive practices). Extensive research has indicated that teachers’ autonomy‐supportive practice and, more proximally, perceiving teachers to engage in autonomy‐supportive practices predict students’ need satisfaction and, in turn, need satisfaction predicts students’ engagement in class (Hafen et al., ; Jang et al., ; Patall et al., , ). For example, Jang and colleagues () found that Korean high school students’ perceptions that teachers supported their autonomy predicted changes in need satisfaction, which, in turn, predicted changes in engagement over the course of a school semester.…”