An autonomy-supportive intervention to develop students’ resilience by boosting agentic engagement

• Published in: International journal of behavioral development Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 325 - 338
• Main Authors: Reeve, Johnmarshall, Cheon, Sung Hyeon, Yu, Tae Ho
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.07.2020; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Autonomy; Classrooms; Discontent; Disengagement; Foreign Countries; Gender Differences; High School Students; Instructional Program Divisions; Intervention; Learner Engagement; Males; Men; Middle School Students; Participant Satisfaction; Passivity; Personal Autonomy; Physical education; Physical Education Teachers; Professional Autonomy; Professional Development; Psychological Needs; Resilience; Resilience (Psychology); Structural Equation Models; Student Empowerment; Student Participation; Student Satisfaction; Students; Teacher Student Relationship; Teachers; Teaching; South Korea; need dissatisfaction; autonomy; Agency; autonomy support; agentic engagement; self-determination theory
• ISSN: 0165-0254; 1464-0651
• DOI: 10.1177/0165025420911103

In the face of everyday classroom challenges, students display resilience by responding with increased agentic engagement. We hypothesized that this tendency toward greater initiative and lesser passivity was both an outcome of autonomy need satisfaction and autonomy-supportive teaching and a predictor of students’ future capacity to experience autonomy satisfaction and to recruit autonomy support. Twenty-two physical education (PE) teachers and their 1,422 Korean students (648 females, 773 males; 929 middle schoolers, 493 high schoolers) were randomly assigned to participate in an autonomy-supportive intervention program (ASIP), and we assessed their students’ autonomy satisfaction, autonomy dissatisfaction, agentic engagement, and agentic disengagement at the beginning, middle, and end of an academic year. By midyear, a multilevel structural equation modeling analysis showed that students of teachers who participated in the ASIP reported greater autonomy satisfaction and agentic engagement and lesser autonomy dissatisfaction and agentic disengagement and also that these gains in agentic engagement and declines in agentic disengagement then predicted those students who were able at year-end to self-generate autonomy need satisfaction and recruit teacher-provided autonomy support.