Differentiated need support by teachers: Student‐specific provision of autonomy and structure and relations with student motivation

BACKGROUND: According to self‐determination theory, teachers can support their students’ engagement in learning by providing autonomy support and structure. Within classes, however, there appears to be great diversity in the extent to which students experience autonomy and structure. AIMS: This study aimed to investigate the degree to which teachers’ perceptions of student‐specific autonomy support and structure differ between students in their class and whether differentiated need support predicts students’ motivation. SAMPLE: Twenty‐four elementary school teachers and their students (n = 506) participated in this study. METHOD: Teachers completed a short questionnaire assessing their perceptions of autonomy support and structure for each student. Students completed two questionnaires assessing perceptions of need support and their motivation. Multilevel analyses were conducted. RESULTS: The results showed that the within‐classroom variation in both teacher perceptions and student perceptions of need support was considerably larger than the between‐classroom variation. Teacher perceptions of student‐specific autonomy support were positively associated with students’ autonomous motivation and negatively with students’ controlled motivation. However, teacher perceptions of student‐specific structure were positively associated with students’ controlled motivation. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that teachers differentiate in need support. The positive association between teacher perceptions of structure and students’ controlled motivation might suggest that teachers may offer structure in controlling rather than autonomy‐supportive ways. Furthermore, the relations between need support and students’ motivation differed between the class‐level and the within‐class (student) level highlighting the need for disentangling the effects of need‐supportive teaching at different levels and adopting a multilevel approach.