Autonomy Supportive Teachers: How They Teach and Motivate Students

 

By: Johnmarshall Reeve, University of Iowa

And

Elizabeth Bolt and Yi Cai, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

 

This article addresses different topics regarding motivational styles, interpersonal motivating techniques, and the importance of autonomy supportive teachers. It emphasizes the variety of motivational styles that teachers can use in the classroom. The article strongly advocates autonomy supportive teachers because they are able to support and identify students' interest as well as the values of the school. On the other hand, controlling teachers offer extrinsic incentives and consequences to the students in attempt to have power over student behavior so desirable states occur more frequently in the classroom.

 

There has been much research done on the effectiveness of teachers' motivational styles. The substance of this article focuses on three studies that were completed in an effort to examine motivating styles. The first study is a measure of the validity of the Problems in Schools (PS) questionnaire, which is an instrument used for assessing motivational styles. This study includes detailed charts and graphs that show test results. However, the graphs are confusing to follow. The second study deals with the assessment of actual teaching behaviors in the classroom. This study also includes a chart that is difficult to read and understand. The final study assesses teachers' self-reports of their actual teaching behaviors. The studies were interesting to read and brought up different aspects of motivation in the classroom. However, I feel that this article did not provide many direct connections to the Intrinsic/Extrinsic Final Motivational Project. While intrinsic and extrinsic factors are a big part of student motivation, they are not talked about precisely in this article. The article focus' on minute details of each study and includes measures, procedures, methods, results and discussion for each study. This article was enlightening to read, but did not provide much valid information to the project.