Teachers' autonomy support and student engagement: a systematic literature review of longitudinal studies
Open accessAbstract
Autonomy support is one of the most crucial determinants of teaching practice for student engagement. No literature review on the relations between autonomy support and student engagement existed to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, this study presents a systematic literature review from perspectives of landscapes, methodology characters, patterns of identified studies, and autonomy-supportive strategies. Overall, 31 articles were reviewed. Followed by PRISMA guidelines, the results yielded several interesting facts: First, studies on such topics surged starting from 2015 and were mostly conducted in the United States (32%) and Korea (16%). Publications were scattered but heavily gathered around psychological and educational journals such as the Journal of Educational Psychology (9.7%) ; Learning and Instruction (9.7%) . Most often, studies recruited participants from upper secondary schools (58%). Data were collected using solely questionnaires (93.5%) following a two-wave design (51.6%) and were analyzed by applying structural equation models (48.4%). Moreover, most of the studies failed to provide concrete autonomy-supportive teaching strategies. Instead, quite often studies (93%) investigated its relations with student engagement from a macro perspective. Within mentioned strategies, they were mostly related to the teaching process, there is a limited investigation of autonomy-supportive teaching practice used before and after instruction. This pattern of results suggested an urgent need for more longitudinal studies on specific teaching strategies that hold the potential to maximize student engagement. Limitations and suggestions for future studies were provided accordingly.
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If teacher support becomes perfunctory or duplicates GenAI feedback, students may perceive no added value and feel annoyed, negatively impacting learning satisfaction.
“However, if such support becomes perfunctory or duplicates GenAI feedback, students may perceive no added value and instead feel annoyed, negatively impacting LS (Yang et al., 2022).”
From Exploring the factors influencing college students’ learning satisfaction in generative AI-supported MOOCs learning environment: a learning experience framework perspective (2025) · cites this paper as Yang et al., 2022
The Discussion and Findings discuss autonomy-supportive teaching and student engagement, but do not address perfunctory support, duplicated GenAI feedback, annoyance, or learning satisfaction. Searches for those terms and for negative effects of teacher support found no passage supporting the attributed claim. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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- Authors
- Yang, D., Chen, P., Wang, H., Wang, K., & Huang, R.
- Affiliations
- Beijing Normal University (CN)
- Capital Normal University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Wang, Kai
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2022-08-22
- Volume
- 13
- Pages
- 925955-925955
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC9441875
- OpenAlex
- W4292574900
- Cited by
- 65
- References
- 71
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 4
- FWCI
- 1.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Motivation and Self-Concept in Sports
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Education, Achievement, and Giftedness
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods
- Keywords
- autonomy support, student engagement, teacher autonomy support, longitudinal study, upper secondary school, teaching practice, self-determination theory
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