Theory and Research in Education

Self-determination theory (SDT) assumes that inherent in human nature is the propensity to be curious about one's environment and interested in learning and developing one's knowledge. All too often, however, educators introduce external controls into learning climates, which can undermine the sense of relatedness between teachers and students, and stifle the natural, volitional processes involved in high-quality learning. This article presents an overview of SDT and reviews its applications to educational practice. A large corpus of empirical evidence based on SDT suggests that both intrinsic motivation and autonomous types of extrinsic motivation are conducive to engagement and optimal learning in educational contexts. In addition, evidence suggests that teachers' support of students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness facilitates students' autonomous self-regulation for learning, academic performance, and well-being. Accordingly, SDT has strong implications for both classroom practice and educational reform policies.

We discuss how K-12 teachers can put motivational principles from self-determination theory into practice. To explain the `how to' of autonomy-supportive teaching, we answer eight frequently asked questions from teachers: What is the goal of autonomy-supportive teaching? How is autonomy-supportive teaching unique? Does autonomy support mean permissiveness? How would I encourage students' initial engagement in learning activities? How could I help students maintain their engagement? What would I say/How might I talk? How would I solve motivational and behavioral problems? How do I know if I provided instruction in an autonomy-supportive way? To answer these questions, we recommend the following classroom practices: take the students' perspective, display patience to allow time for learning, nurture inner motivational resources, provide explanatory rationales, rely on noncontrolling language, and acknowledge and accept expressions of negative effect.

Various motivational frameworks converge to suggest that highlighting the relevance of a learning activity yields benefits for students' learning and performance. Herein, we review a set of studies grounded in self-determination theory's distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals, which show that the beneficial effect of a learning activity's utility value should be nuanced. Specifically, this effect depends on the particular goal that activity is thought to serve, such that intrinsic goal framing enhances learning and performance, whereas extrinsic goal framing does not. Such effects emerge regardless of students' personal goal preferences. Overall, this research suggests that teachers might do well to consider the content of the promoted goal when highlighting the utility value of a learning activity.

Self-determination theory identifies three dimensions of parenting — autonomy support versus control, involvement, and structure — as facilitating children's autonomous motivation in school. Research involving children of a range of ages — one-year-olds through adolescents — and from a variety of research labs supports this theory. This work is reviewed, as is research on characteristics of children and parents and their external surrounds that facilitate and undermine parenting that is conducive to children's autonomous motivation. Research suggests bidirectional and dynamic influences among context, parenting, and children's motivation.

The purpose of the present article is to review the contextual conditions that lead teachers to be more controlling rather than autonomy supportive with their students. Research indicates that the more teachers perceive that school administration thwarts their autonomy by imposing pressures on them, the less autonomous they are in their motivation for teaching, the more they become controlling in their teaching, and the more students demonstrate a controlled motivation orientation. At this point an element of reciprocity is introduced: teachers may be affected by the lack of students' motivation and their low performance because this reinforces the administration's perception that something needs to be done. Then teachers may perceive a pressure to behave in a controlling manner to be sure that the administration's standards are achieved.

Historically, medical education has focused largely on medical students' intellectual development, mostly ignoring the broader psychological milieu of medical practice. This chasm can result in practitioners who are less likely to process their emotions and/or support their patient's needs, and more likely to experience burnout. Self-determination theory (SDT) offers a unique perspective for understanding how the medical education environment can promote better integration of cognitive and psychological development through supporting the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, thus facilitating internalization of autonomous self-regulation for medical practice. Herein, we examine research applying SDT to medical education and offer suggestions that may facilitate both practitioners' and patients' well-being.

This article presents a brief overview of empirical studies in school physical education (PE) that have employed self-determination theory (SDT) and, where relevant, proposes ideas for future research in this area. First, we review research on teachers' interpersonal style and its relation to students' motivation. Second, we discuss intervention studies aimed at optimizing teachers' interactions with students. Third, we present an overview of findings suggesting that basic psychological needs and motivational regulations predict various cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes in PE. Finally, we provide practical recommendations for PE teachers drawing from initial intervention studies in PE.

This article focuses on additive bilingualism for minority group children, more specifically the development of strong literacy skills in English and in the children's language. The personal autonomization language learning (PALL) model is presented. It specifies eight testable hypotheses. Self-determination theory (SDT) is central in the PALL model. It is argued that autonomy support in both languages is related to basic needs satisfaction (autonomy, competence, relatedness: ACR) which is in turn related to internally regulated motivation for learning the language. Owing to the strong social attraction of English, the model proposes that favouring the learning of the minority language and basic needs satisfaction in that language foster additive bilingualism because of the strong interlinguistic transfer of minority language competencies and of an internal motivational orientation. Self-determination to learn the minority language and minority literacy skills seems to transfer across languages. Research results support the model; these are summarized and educational implications are discussed.

Participation in expansive video games called `virtual worlds' has become a mainstream leisure activity for tens of millions of people around the world. The growth of this industry and the strong motivational appeal of these digital worlds invite a closer examination as to how educators can learn from today's virtual worlds in the development of next generation learning environments. Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci, 2000) has shown value in explaining both the motivational dynamics of learning (Deci et al., 1994), as well as the strong motivational pull of video games and virtual worlds (Ryan et al., 2006). As such, SDT provides a framework that can bridge the gap between education and consumer virtual worlds and be applied to new research and development in how to best build virtual worlds for learning. The concept of the `learner hero' is introduced as a potentially useful unifying concept in considering how to leverage the high motivational appeal of commercial virtual worlds in building digital learning environments.

Using tests to compare nations, states, school districts, schools, teachers, and students has increasingly become a basis for educational reform around the globe. Although tests can be informative, high-stakes testing (HST) is an approach to reform that applies rewards and sanctions contingent on test outcomes. Results of HST reforms indicate a plethora of unintended negative consequences, leading some to suggest that HST corrupts educational practices in schools. Although there are many accounts of these negative results, SDT supplies the only systematic theory of motivation that explains these effects. In what follows we describe the motivational principles underlying the undermining effects of HST on teachers and learners alike.

We propose that self-determination theory's conceptualization of internalization may help school reformers overcome the recurrent problem of `the predictable failure of educational reform' (Sarason, 1993). Accordingly, we present a detailed learning and implementation structure to promote teachers' internalization and application of ideas and practices based on self-determination theory. Finally, we discuss findings from two studies that (1) demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed structure in promoting educational reform, and (2) highlight the components of this structure that teachers report to be valuable.

Successful school reform requires that administrators, teachers, and students internalize the value of improved teaching and learning and of the policies, structures, procedures, and behaviors implicit in the reform. This is most likely to happen when school personnel and students experience satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness while planning and implementing the reform. When the components of a reform are relatively flexible rather than rigid and when the processes through which the reform is introduced and implemented are autonomy supportive, people will experience greater need satisfaction and will be more likely to internalize and endorse the reform. This article focuses on one approach to comprehensive school reform, namely, First Things First, and examines it in terms of self-determination theory principles.

In this article I highlight recent (published after 2000) cross-cultural studies on the role of autonomous academic motivation and autonomy support in students' cognitive and psychological development. The self-determination theory (SDT) thesis of a universal beneficial role of autonomous motivation is supported by numerous empirical results from educational researchers from diverse educational settings around the world. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of recognizing students' basic needs for autonomy in learning environments, and the cultural deterministic models of socio-cultural differences that have obscured that need. Studies within the SDT provide strong psychological evidence to support a more interactive, multidimensional picture of human nature in various sociocultural contexts.

In many graduate schools of education there is strong resistance to formal theories, especially those that are supported through quantitative empirical methods. In this article we describe how self-determination theory (SDT), a formal and empirically focused framework, shares sensibilities with critical theorists concerning the importance of actors' own embedded experiences of the world, and the importance of liberation and resistance to hegemony. Yet we argue that, unlike many post-modern views that are largely negative, SDT is truly critical precisely because it posits a common human nature, which can be more or less supported and allowed to flourish in different cultural and institutional contexts.