Abstract
Teachers’ behaviors can affect students’ engagement in the Physical Education (PE) setting. According to self-determination theory, teachers can rely on either a need-supportive or a controlling teaching behavior, and these behaviors will differently affect students’ outcomes. The main objective of this research was to analyse how teaching behaviors and some contextual variables influence students’ engagement in PE classes. The present study adds to the existing literature through an observation-based design in which real-life examples of need-supportive and thwarting teaching behaviors, as well as students’ engagement behaviors, have been identified. Thirty-seven different PE lessons were coded for 5-min intervals to assess the occurrence of 36 teaching behaviors and five students’ behaviors. Stepwise regression revealed that both structure during activity and relatedness support could predict student engagement in a positive way. Surprisingly, cold teaching also emerged as a direct predictor in the last step of the analysis. On the other hand, controlling and structure before activity behaviors inversely predicted students’ engagement. These four variables explained 39% of the variance in student engagement, whereas autonomy support did not correlate with student engagement. These new findings in the field not only confirm the known relevance of teaching behavior for students’ outcomes but also suggest an unexpected lack of influence of autonomy support on students’ engagement as well as an association between cold teaching and students’ engagement. Results are discussed in the light of new approaches, and some practical implications are provided.
Highlights
The physical education (PE) setting can be an ideal context to encourage the acquisition of healthy lifestyles and adherence to physical activity (PA) and sport throughout a pupil’s life development [1,2]
As expected, this study showed that structure during activity support and the relatedness-support behaviors showed a positive relationship with behavioral engagement
This study explored the relationship between student engagement, teaching behavior, and contextual variables
Summary
Student engagement is a multifaceted concept that reflects behavioral, emotional, and cognitive aspects [3]. When students are engaged in class, they listen, strive, and persist in the task, answer the questions the teacher asks or enjoy doing the proposed activities [4,5]. When students are not engaged in the class, they do not display effort or persistence, they give up they do not listen to the teacher, and they get bored [6]. Behavioral engagement has emerged as an important construct in the prediction of students’ performance and learning achievement [7]. Different authors have studied this topic, pointing out a positive consequence of the way in which the teacher interacts with his or her students [8,9]
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