A meta-analytic review of the relationships between autonomy support and positive learning outcomes

Abstract

The current study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis of the relations between students’ perceived teacher and parent autonomy support and positive learning outcomes by synthesizing 378 effect sizes from 179 independent samples in 153 studies (N = 213,612). We identified six categories that broadly capture positive learning outcomes: autonomous motivation, student behavioral engagement, mastery goal, self-regulated learning, self-beliefs, and academic performance. The findings demonstrate the importance of autonomy support in education contexts. Using correlation coefficients as our effect size index, we found the estimated average effect size of 0.32, with wide between- and within-cluster heterogeneity. The effects of several moderators were examined. The type of learning outcomes and the agent of autonomy support were significant moderators. Gender distribution had a significant moderating effect for teacher autonomy support, when all other moderators were held constant. The higher the percentage of females in the sample, the lower the correlation between teacher autonomy support and learning outcomes. Autonomous motivation, student behavioral engagement, and self-beliefs yielded largest effect sizes in being predicted by autonomy support. Of all learning outcomes, academic performance had the weakest overall relationship with autonomy support. Meta-analytic path analyses suggested that this relationship was partially mediated by other learning outcomes such as autonomous motivation and student engagement. Taken together, these findings provide compelling evidence for the importance of teacher and parent autonomy support for promoting positive learning outcomes in diverse educational settings from elementary school through university.