Criticisms of SDT that have informed the current research

When SDT was first proposed as a social motivational meta-theory, its’ authors acknowledged that research would be needed to develop the theory so that teachers and researchers could understand, within specific settings, the “… environmental factors that hinder or undermine self-motivation, social functioning, and personal well-being” (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p. 69). To date, SDT-embedded research investigating motivational variables that have a positive impact upon students’ engagement has primarily pinpointed three key factors that inform students’ sustained engagement with learning activities. One of these is students’ enjoyment of learning within a learning environment, where they are able to perceive their own competence. This becomes the motivational drive for the making of volitional choices that enable them to exercise their own autonomy. The second factor involves being in receipt of feedback by a teacher that gives the student a sense of their current competence and

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strategies for achieving continued success within learning. Whilst autonomy and competence- informed motivational drives may be cumulative, SDT has highlighted the important

motivational influence of the teacher upon student engagement. The role of the teacher has been increasingly located centrally to the motivation that stems from the enhancement and progression of feelings of autonomy and competence (Reeve, 2012; Ryan and Deci, 2009). For example, Weinstein (2002) notes that the teacher plays a crucial role in helping children to construe and act upon feelings of competence, confidence, self-efficacy and self-

determined motivation to learn, as:

“… children rarely look to themselves or the qualities of the task in which they are engaged for information about how they are doing – a fact that emphasizes …the dependent role in which we place students in classroom settings. That we do not foster self-monitoring of their work and their accomplishments as a primary source of feedback about capability is perhaps our downfall, given the growing evidence about the important role of self-efficacy in human development…”

(p. 113)

During the first part of the review of student engagement, when viewed through the theoretical lens of SDT, the question arose as to whether there may be a hierarchy amongst the three SDT constructs / needs in terms of their impact upon each other and, as an outcome, engagement. The possibility of a hierarchy of influence and impact was an unconsidered or unaddressed possibility across the encountered SDT research literature. However, such a hierarchy amongst variables informing different forms of engagement has been proposed by Reschly and Christenson (2006, 2012). They argue that cognitive and emotional engagement precede and inform the quality and persistence of behavioural engagement. Fredricks et al. (2004) felt that research was needed to investigate the interplay between different variables informing engagement as a multidimensional concept, as many studies, including SDT- embedded engagement studies, had not considered how cognitive factors interplay with affect and behavioural outcomes to inform students’ motivation to engage with learning activities. In addition, although the reciprocal relations between social contextual factors, academic perceptions and engagement have been investigated (Skinner and Belmont, 1993), this has not been fully considered within SDT-embedded research. Finally, as has been discussed within the current research (see sections 1.5), how the three SDT needs potentially mediate between sociocultural factors and engagement had not been investigated by most studies seeking to understand engagement. Least studied are the motivational relationships between

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perceived competence and students’ engagement with learning. Indeed, when considering prior research, it has been difficult to envisage the potential ‘route map’ of the interplay between the three constructs of SDT and their motivational impact upon engagement with learning activities, as all three constructs have been presented as being simultaneous in their influence. This was true of, where included, both written described pathways and proposed pathways as diagrammatic models within published research.

Therefore, it may be that, contrary to published SDT models, that some of the

proposed needs and components informing motivation and engagement have a greater impact comparative to others, that some needs are required as the threshold for other needs to be motivated, and that a larger amount of one component is sufficient to compensate for less of another. As SDT focuses upon only the three specific basic psychological needs, this may result in stifled discussions regarding the inclusion and consideration of other motivational variables that need to be considered if one is to develop a more informed picture of the motivational ‘pathways’ between classroom-based variables and student engagement with learning activities. Such criticisms of SDT have been placed central to the current research: this included a focus upon investigating the potential interplay between how the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and contextual variables influence engagement across different developmental stages, as “students may not become deeply invested in learning until they have the intellectual capacity to self-regulate and become intentional learners, which tends to occur at later ages” (Fredricks et al, 2004, p. 84). This was further to the observation that ‘The presumption is that support from the teacher meets an individual’s need for relatedness; but, for the most part, the mediation assumption has not been tested’ (Fredricks et al, 2004, p. 86).

As it may be that engagement is an outcome in response to the motivational energy that students gain from the teacher satisfying the need for competence or autonomy, or both, the first research question centred upon defining the potential hierarchical relationship between students’ self-determined motivation and their sustained engagement with learning activities within lessons, including the mediating variables that influence motivation and engagement within learning contexts: that is, what does SDT-embedded evidence reveal to be the strongest teacher behaviours that have motivational influences upon students’ engagement with learning? This has been investigated through an MER (next section).

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2.10 Using Meta-Ethnographic Review and Best Evidence Synthesis protocols to