Differences in need-supportive teaching toward students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and the role of teachers’ attitudes

Abstract

According to Self-Determination Theory, teachers can enhance their students’ motivation, engagement, and learning through need-supportive teaching, which involves providing autonomy support, structure, and involvement. However, within classes, there appears to be great variation in the degree to which teachers support students’ psychological needs. The current studies aimed to investigate to what extent this differentiation in need support was associated with students’ socioeconomic background. Additionally, we examined whether teachers differentiated their need support more strongly when they had more biased explicitly or implicitly measured attitudes toward students from a low socioeconomic background. We conducted two studies: Study 1 was a vignette study representing a fictional student from a high or low socioeconomic background, and Study 2 was a field study where teachers reported on the need support provided to real students from a high and low socioeconomic background from their own class. Findings of both studies indicated that teachers reported lower levels of involvement for students from a low compared to a high socioeconomic background. Moreover, in Study 2, teachers reported to provide students from a low socioeconomic background with less autonomy support and more structure compared to students from a high socioeconomic background. However, these differences in autonomy support and structure seemed to be related to other student characteristics, namely students’ gender, and teachers’ perceptions of students’ academic ability and classroom behavior. Furthermore, we revealed that teachers differentiated their need support more strongly when they had more biased attitudes toward low socioeconomic backgrounds.