Student engagement and teacher motivating style : a focus on agentic engagement and teacher autonomy support from a longitudinal and multilevel perspective

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the relationship between teacher autonomy support and student engagement and to reveal the extent to which student engagement explains the variance in teacher autonomy support at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of a semester which is sixteen weeks long school term. It also aims at revealing the extent to which student engagement explains the variance in longitudinal increase of teacher autonomy support. Lastly, this study attempts to uncover the factors that might affect teacher autonomy support and student engagement. For this purpose, a mixed methods design research is conducted. A total of 212 participants from the School of Foreign Languages at Akdeniz University participated in the quantitative part of the study. 12 students and their instructor volunteered for the qualitative part. To collect data, Four Aspects of Student Engagement Questionnaire, Learning Climate Questionnaire, observation sheet, hit-steer observation system, semi-structured interviews, and stimulated recall protocols were utilized. The analysis of the data revealed that teacher autonomy support and student engagement had a significant relationship. It was also revealed that agentic engagement explained the variance in teacher autonomy support to some extent. However, student engagement did not explain the increase in perceived teacher autonomy support. It was found that teacher autonomy support and student engagement were affected by a number of factors such as student and teacher characteristics, course and institution related factors, and environmental factors.