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

Abstract

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.

Academic Resilience and Engagement in High School Students: The Mediating Role of Perceived Teacher Emotional Support

“…Resilient students are the ones who reengage and do not give up when dealing with overwhelming academic tasks. This feature is predictive of several positive outcomes, such as enjoyment of school, class participation, and general self-esteem [ 3 , 20 , 21 ].…”

Apoyo a la autonomía en la resiliencia de los estudiantes a través de un modelo cognitivo-social de motivación

“…Consequently, the results represent a contribution to the literature regarding resilience. Within the PE context, few studies show that satisfaction of the BPN positively predicts resilience (Abualkibash & Lera, 2017;Reeve, Cheon, & Yu, 2020), teachers can empower students to develop behaviors or characteristics of a resilient person by encouraging autonomous motivation, which is significantly related to positive results in student's behavior and psycho-social well-being (Lim et al, 2016). Therefore, it is relevant to investigate ways or strategies to support autonomy that help students to deal with stressful situations or experiences within the PE class.…”

“…However, throughout the educational process, students sometimes are face with challenges which are related to the management of materials, expectations of competence, difficulties of tasks, and unresolved problems or pressures related to social relationships. In this scenario students can be lead to a low quality of motivation, which could be avoided if students had a resilience to adversity that would help them recover from these obstacles, resuming task with high effort capacity and turning problems into personal challenges that can help them progress academically and personally (Reeve, Cheon, & Yu, 2020). This behavioral adaptation is related to resilience, which is defined as a dynamic process or construct of positive adaptation in the face of adversity, which allows human beings to learn from these unfavorable situations to move forward in their personal life (González-Arratia, Valdez, & Zavala, 2008;Gras et al, 2019).…”

“…Although some research has analyzed the relationship between autonomy support and its effects on student behavior in the context of PE (Chang et al, 2016;Pérez-González et al, 2019), very few have delved into the relationship of autonomy support with resilience (Abualkibash & Lera, 2017;Montero-Carretero & Cervelló, 2020;Reeve, Cheon, & Yu, 2020), taking as a mediating variable the quality of students' social bonds with their classmates. In this sense, the aim of the present study is to test the predictive relationship between autonomy support on resilience, through the BPN, autonomous motivation, cooperation and affiliation as cognitive-social mediators.…”

Introduction to the special section on the development of motivational resilience in school

“…In the third empirical paper, Reeve, Cheon and Yu (2020) build on their earlier work testing complex models of mediational predictions made by self-determination theory (Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2012). In this study, they focus on the concept of “agentic engagement” (Reeve, 2013) and investigate the role of teacher autonomy support in promoting the development of engagement over time.…”