Building autonomous learners: perspectives from research and practice using self-determination theory

By S. Earl. British Journal of Educational Studies, 2019

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The book Building Autonomous Learners: Perspectives from Research and Practice using Self-Determination Theory offers a thorough account of the theoretical tenets of self-determination theory (SDT) and how they can be applied within the contexts of school learning, sport and parenting. The editors, and each respective chapter author, provide a logical illustration of how motivationally supportive climates can foster a range of cognitive, affective and behavioural adaptive outcomes in children, as well as learners of all ages. Adding to the more theoretical and developmental books of SDT (Ryan and Deci, 2017; Wehmeyer et al., 2017), the reviewed book makes a successful attempt to direct educators and parents in how to integrate motivationally supportive strategies within the daily practices of school classrooms and home life. Through reading the book, a clear understanding can be gained of not only why the support of learners’ autonomous motivation may promote emotional well-being and learning engagement, but also how practitioners may create such motivationally supportive environments. The book begins by providing an overview of SDT, distinguishing the different types of quality motivation (i.e. autonomous versus controlled), dissimilar goals and motives (i.e. intrinsic versus extrinsic), and introducing the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. A specific focus of the book regards the fostering of autonomy support, structure (competence support) and interpersonal involvement (relatedness support) within different environments. The book builds upon the well-established concept of autonomy support and provides new insights into how autonomy support can be understood and applied. A number of chapters outline the explicit components of autonomy support for teachers to employ in pre-lesson planning and in-classroom teaching. The book also offers new instructional methods of enhancing autonomous motivation and coping with non-successful events or challenging tasks. I found the ‘instruction sequence’ provided in Chapter 8 to be particularly insightful, promoting co-operation between teachers and students when setting learning objectives, formulating work plans and structuring feedback to foster psychological need satisfaction. Furthermore, the book may be of interest and use to parents by exemplifying how different parenting styles can facilitate, or thwart, children’s autonomous motivation, emotional well-being and learning. Chapters 9 and 10 specifically discuss how parents can be involved in their children’s learning in an autonomy supportive manner, both at school and at home. A particular strength of the book is that it demonstrates the conceptual links between SDTand other psychological concepts and theories, such as achievement goal theory (AGT; British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 67, No. 2, June 2019, pp. 269–282

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Safety Research, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/547ef7bd5607e90c5da9f0b3e8ed80bcd3a35779

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Citations in the corpus

How teachers can support students’ agentic engagement (2020, background): “A teacher’s motivating style refers to the “interpersonal tone” (Reeve, 2016), “orientation toward students” (Deci, Schwartz, Sheinman, & Ryan, 1981), or “basic attitude” (Aelterman et al., 2019) he or she relies on when trying to engage students in learning activities.”
Self-Determination and Classroom Engagement of EFL Learners: A Mixed-Methods Study of the Self-System Model of Motivational Development (2019, background): “…evidence that engagement is strongly related to effective learning (e.g., academic achievement, Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2016; Schlenker, Schlenker, & Schlenker, 2013), and it is often portrayed as a remedy for students’ disruptive school behaviors and failing…”
When teachers learn how to provide classroom structure in an autonomy-supportive way: Benefits to teachers and their students (2020, background): “…and they do this by learning how to take their students' perspective, present learning activities in ways that appreciate and support students' autonomy, provide explanatory rationales for their requests, accept expressions of negative affect, and rely on invitational language (Reeve, 2016).”
Fostering self-efficacy and self-regulation in higher education: a matter of autonomy support or academic motivation? (2019, background): “We also expect perceived autonomy support to relate positively to learning outcomes in terms of both self-efficacy (hypothesis 2b) (Alivernini & Lucidi, 2011; Wang et al., 2016) and self-regulation (hypothesis 2c) (Sierens et al., 2009; Stefanou et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2016).”
Fostering Personal Meaning and Self-relevance: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Internalization (2018, background): “…fostering greater internalization, need satisfaction has been found to come with multiple other benefits, including greater engagement (Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2016; Wilson et al., 2012), more self-regulated learning (Mouratidis, Vansteenkiste, Michou, & Lens, 2013), and higher well-being (Chen et…”
Students' Agentic Engagement Predicts Longitudinal Increases in Perceived Autonomy-Supportive Teaching: The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease (2018, unknown): “The left side of Table 6 list several agentic acts of engagement students ’ might display (taken from Reeve, 2013), while the right side of Table 6 lists several acts of autonomy-supportive instruction a teacher might display (taken from Reeve, 2016).”