Objective Evaluation of Teachers' Need-Supportive Instructional Practices in Physical Education

Background/Purpose:  During the past two decades, studies on teachers’ instructional practices have increasingly been conducted from the perspective of self-determination theory. Previous studies have shown that need-supportive instructional practices that provide autonomy, structure, and relatedness are instrumental in student motivation and learning in various educational settings. Although it has been shown that some physical education (PE) teachers in the Mid-South U.S. are more vested in improving the performance of their varsity athletic teams than in educating all students to be physically literate, there is a lack of studies examining PE teachers’ instructional practices using objective measures. Thus, the aim of this study was examine urban PE teachers’ need-support during authentic PE lessons and its predictive strength on school students’ self-determined motivation in PE.

Method: The sample comprised five urban middle schools, seven PE teachers, and 347 students (11 to 14 years old) located in the Mid-South U.S. All PE teachers were experienced (M_age = 46.75 years) and tenured teachers (M_{teaching experience}= 17.25 years) in the local school district where their teaching was audiotaped across an 8-week unit. Utilizing the checklist of Haerins et al. (2011), three researchers individually coded 49 PE lessons for 5-min intervals to examine teachers’ need supportive instructional practices during three stages of PE class (i.e., warm-up, activity, and cooldown).  The 16 predetermined instructional practices were coded using a 4-point frequency scale, ranging from 0 (never observed) to 1 (sometimes observed), to 2 (often observed), and to 3 (observed all the time). Students’ self-determined motivation was measured using a self-report. 

Analysis/Results: The study showed that teachers provided very little autonomy-support during PE classes (M_warm-up = .39[.11]; M_activity = .51[.12]; M_cooldown = .86[.04]). However, teachers often facilitated relatedness (M_warm-up = 1.89[.30]; M_activity = 1.82[.46]; M_cooldown = 2.73[.24]) and sometimes provided structure (M_warm-up = 1.03[.23]; M_activity = 1.00[.32]; M_cooldown = 1.79[.02]). Path analyses showed objectively measured instructional practices to explain 12-15% of the changes in self-determined motivation (intrinsic motivation and identified and introjected regulation) toward PE, whereas teachers’ need-support did not predict their extrinsic regulation and amotivation.

Conclusions: The study showed that urban PE teachers facilitated students’ need-support by mainly providing structure during their PE classes. However, teachers’ instructional practices were more controlling instead of autonomy-supportive. The findings of the study indicated that teachers’ need-support has a role in facilitating urban middle school students’ self-determined motivation.