Instructional context and student motivation,learning,and development: Commentary and implications for school psychologists

Abstract

From an ecological perspective, learning and development in childhood and throughout the lifespan occur in the context of interactions within complex social networks. Collectively, the articles in this special issue illuminate three important themes related to teacher-student interactions within instructional contexts: relationships, competence, and agency. Through consultation and systems level advocacy, school psychologists can use these themes as starting points for improving the instructional context for both students and teachers.

Keywords

agency competence ecological systems motivation school psychology teacher-student relationships

Child development is contextual, dynamic, and shaped by reciprocal interactions with others (Overton, 2010). According to Bronfenbrenner (1994),

Especially in its early phases, and to a great extent throughout the life course, human development takes place through processes of progressively more complex reciprocal interaction between an active, evolving biopsychological human organism and the persons, objects, and symbols in its immediate environment. (p. 38)

Teachers play important roles in children’s ecological networks (Bierman, 2011) and thereby in their learning, motivation, and development (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). In this commentary, we use Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) ecological model to discuss how the articles in this special issue contribute to our understanding of (a) characteristics that facilitate or hinder the quality of instructional contexts; (b) social interactions that occur between students and teachers that form an important part of a child’s microsystem (i.e. proximal environments where direct interactions that are important for development occur); (c) how the teachers themselves are influenced by factors in the child’s exosystem—systems that influence a child indirectly, through their effect on the teachers; and (d) ways that school psychologists can impact children’s microsystems and exosystems by supporting teachers and influencing the instructional context.

Characteristics of teacher-student interactions in instructional contexts

The articles in this special issue differ greatly from one another regarding national and school context, unit of analysis, target theoretical constructs, and methodology. This diversity reflects the multidimensionality of instructional contexts, the profusion of facilitative and hindering interactive processes operating in these contexts, and the various methodological approaches that scholars adopt to study them. Yet, this diversity also corroborates a sizable theoretical and empirical literature and highlights the central and complementary roles of three facets of instructional contexts in students’ learning and development: (a) quality of teacher-student relationships; (b) teacher support of students’ competence; and (c) teacher support of students’ agency. Arguably, these themes come together most coherently and explicitly in Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000)—a macro developmental theoretical framework, noted by several of the current authors, that is premised on the assumption that contexts facilitative of motivation and development are characterized by support of people’s three basic psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Moreover, in the school context, relatedness, competence, and autonomy have been shown to predict favorable academic and social-emotional outcomes (e.g. improved scores on achievement tests, motivation, study skills, engagement; Allen, Pianta, Gregory, Mikami, & Lun, 2011; DiPerna, Volpe, & Elliott, 2005; Hughes & Kwok, 2007).

The contextual facets of teacher-student relationships, teacher support of students’ competence (i.e. skills, attitudes, and behaviors that contribute to academic performance), and teacher support of students’ agency (i.e. ability to act in accordance with their own sense of purpose) operate in the student’s microsystem. They manifest in daily teacher-student interactions. For example, teachers’ gestures of empathy reflect teacher-student relationship quality; classroom activities that provide affordances for students’ development of skills (e.g. repeated reading, reading with structured questioning; Swanson et al., 2011) versus those that highlight their deficits (e.g. the ‘round-robin’ approach to oral reading; Ash, Kuhn, & Walpole, 2009) can be expected to influence a student’s sense of competence; and practices that promote students’ voice and sense of personal identity rather than emphasizing obedience and inferiority reflect student agency.

The themes of relationships, competence, and agency also manifest within the student’s exosystem, as the teacher’s motivation for and capacity to create optimal instructional contexts is influenced by factors such as school-wide discipline policies and the nature of the relationships the teacher has with administrators and colleagues. Notably, many relationships within a student’s exosystem form the basis of the teacher’s microsystem (e.g. relationships between teachers and administrators). These characteristics of the student’s exosystem, and the teacher’s microsystem, can promote or hinder the teacher’s own sense of relatedness, competence, and autonomy, and impact his or her development, well-being, and motivation for teaching. In what follows, we discuss each of the complementary facets of the instructional context, noting the contribution of the articles in the special issue to understandings regarding facilitative and hindering processes, and considering opportunities for school psychologists to intervene at both the students’ microsystemic and exosystemic (the teachers’ microsystemic) levels.

Positive teacher-student relationships

Relationships are a fundamental aspect of human psychological development across many perspectives, including the psychosocial (Erikson, 1968), humanist (Rogers, 1980), and evolutionary (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), and increasing evidence supports the important role of student-teacher relationships in child development. A recent meta-analysis of 99 articles demonstrated that teacher-student relationship quality is associated with student engagement (medium to large effect) and student achievement (small to medium effect; Roorda et al., 2011). This evidence corroborates students' own words about what is important to them in school. An interview study with 54 diverse high school students by the Center for Research on the Context of Secondary School Teaching in Stanford University indicated that students put tremendous value on ‘having teachers who care’ (Phelan, Davidson, & Cao, 1992, p. 698). Unfortunately, many teachers do not generate perceptions of caring by their students, and students are acutely sensitive to and may respond with resentful compliance, withdrawal, or disruption to teachers whom they perceive as uncaring or disdainful of students (Phelan et al., 1992).

In her case study of a teacher who works with students with history of academic failure, Frelin (current issue) adopts a relational perspective to conceptualize and highlight the teacher’s strong belief in the centrality of the warm, supportive, and close relationships with her students to their self-image, academic engagement, and grades. Data from the longitudinal interviews portray the teacher’s deep commitment to and experience of forming such relationships with the students, and her belief that establishing students’ trust in her caring is a necessary precursor to their willingness to re-evaluate their negative academic self-image and invest in schoolwork.

Importantly, the teacher described in Frelin’s study was employed in a school context that provided flexibility and affordances for creating a trusting relationship with students. The class size was small, the academic pressure seemed modest but still appropriately challenging, and the teacher had the freedom to cater her strategies to fit her students. A notable contribution of Frelin’s case study is the portrayal of teacher-student relationships as dynamic and continuously evolving rather than as a stable feature of the instructional context. The teacher builds relationships over time, establishing trust at first, and changing strategies and emphases as relationships develop. Because relationships evolve over time, it is important for researchers to employ methodological and analytical techniques that utilize longitudinal data and account for the contextualized reciprocal influences (e.g. variations of structural equation modeling intended for longitudinal analyses, qualitative approaches, exploratory network modeling approaches). Researchers who fail to account for time and interactional reciprocity run the risk of reducing their insights into overly simplistic conclusions. Frelin’s case study reminds us that instructional contexts are complex, dynamic, and themselves influenced by changing individuals within the environment as well as outside forces.

Teacher support of student competence

Academic competence has been defined as ‘a multi-dimensional construct composed of the skills, attitudes, and behaviors that contribute to teachers’ judgments of academic performance’ (DiPerna & Elliot, 1999, p. 208). Students’ beliefs about their competence (i.e. academic self-concept, self-efficacy, success expectations; Bandura, 1997; Marsh & Shavelson, 1985) in the early elementary years predict various indicators of later academic achievement (e.g. grades, standardized test scores; DiPerna et al., 2005). Moreover, in post-secondary settings, students’ perceptions of their academic competence have been shown to influence their decisions about investment of effort, course enrollment, undergraduate majors, and careers (Schunk & Usher, 2012). Students’ competence and positive beliefs about their competence develop most optimally when students engage in schoolwork with the orientation to learn, understand, and improve knowledge and skills—termed mastery-approach goals (Ames, 1992; Elliot, 1999). Unfortunately, as evidenced by some of the articles in this special issue, too often and despite teachers’ best intentions, students engage in schoolwork with a strong concern about demonstrating inadequacy when performing academic skills. In other words, students are often motivated primarily by a desire to avoid failure of poor performance, termed performance-avoidance goals (Elliot, 1999), and many have low perceived academic competence and perceived efficacy, and experience high test-anxiety (e.g. Putwain & Symes, 2012; Segool, von der Embse, Mata, & Gallant, 2014). Several facets in the instructional context can interact in ways that have differing consequences for students' motivation and sense of competence. (Ames, 1992; Reeve, 2011). Two such facets that received much attention in the parenting literature are responsiveness (i.e. warmth and nurturance) and high expectations (i.e. demandingness for students’ responsibility, independence, and performance; Darling & Steinberg, 1993). Parents’ responsiveness to their children interacts with high expectations to characterize the authoritative parenting style. In many cultures, the authoritative parenting style has been associated with adaptive development and well-being (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). Similar teaching characteristics (high responsiveness or nurturance with high expectations) predicted academic performance and positive social behavior among middle school students (Wentzel, 2002).

Mainhard (2015, this issue) investigated teaching styles that related to agency (high expectations and demandingness) and communion (responsiveness), identified eight distinct interpersonal profiles, and examined the relationships between teacher interpersonal profiles and students’ achievement goals—their reasons for engaging in schoolwork. The findings supported the notion that combining high agency with high communion was most adaptive and promoted students’ mastery-approach goals—defined as engaging in schoolwork with the goals of developing competence, learning, and understanding (as opposed to engaging in schoolwork primarily to earn a particular grade or external reward).

In addition to influencing student achievement goals, teaching styles that combine high expectations and high responsiveness may also be associated with more or less adaptive instructional strategies. Specifically, Symes and colleagues’ (2015, this issue) and von der Embse and colleagues’ (2015, this issue) articles concern the teachers’ instructional strategy of fear appeals—emphasizing to students the negative consequences of low effort and low achievement. Arguably, fear appeals could be construed as an instructional strategy that combines responsiveness (emphasizing care about the students’ future, albeit in a problematic way) with high expectations (highlighting the importance of effort and achievement). Yet, the strategy relies on eliciting fear to impel student motivation. In a quasi-experiment, von der Embse et al. contrasted the instructional strategies of fear appeals with efficacy appeals—aiming to motivate students by expressing confidence in their efficacy—and found that while fear appeals somewhat hindered students’ achievement, efficacy appeals enhanced it. In comparison, Symes et al. found that high school mathematics students in England interpreted fear appeals either as threatening or as challenging depending on their academic buoyancy—their tendency to ‘bounce back’ from academic failure. Those with high academic buoyancy tended to perceive fear appeals as a challenge whereas those with low academic buoyancy tended to perceive them as a threat. It was noteworthy that even academically buoyant students started perceiving fear appeals as threatening when their frequency increased.

These studies suggest that not all demanding/high expectation instructional strategies are motivationally equal; student characteristics may moderate the impact of such strategies on student performance. Fear appeals seem to have potentially detrimental effects relative to efficacy appeals. However, the findings concerning the different perceptions among students with different academic buoyancy reiterate the need to select instructional strategies while attending to the characteristics of the students and the context. Eventually, more than the teacher’s intention, it is how students experience the strategy that matters.

Importantly, both Symes and colleagues’ (2015, this issue) and von der Embse and colleagues’ (2015, this issue) articles highlight the broader environment that may impel teachers’ use of fear appeals: High- stakes testing and stressful teacher accountability. When teachers feel threatened, such as when their tenure is tied to standardized test scores, they may be more likely to employ threatening instructional strategies, such as fear appeals (Deci, Schwaratz, Sheinman, & Ryan, 1981; Saeki, Pendergast, Segool, & von der Embse, 2015). Thus, a student’s sense of competence could potentially be influenced directly by factors in the microsystem (e.g. teacher use of fear appeals; von der Embse et al., 2015, this issue) as well as factors in the exosystem (e.g. district policies tying teacher tenure to student test performance).

Teacher support of student agency

Agency involves a sense of purpose and the ability to harness personal, social, and environmental resources to set goals and act in pursuit of that purpose (Bandura, 1997; Ford, 1992). Agency is complementary to the facets of teacher-student relationships and student competence. A sense of competence is central to exercising agency (Bandura, 1997), and at its core, agency requires autonomy—a sense that one is an origin of one’s actions (deCharms, 1968). Self-determination theory (SDT) positions autonomy or self-determination at the core of actions that reflect intrinsic motivation, deep learning, adaptive growth, and high performance (Deci & Ryan, 2012). Many studies over the past several decades have supported the relations of feeling autonomous rather than controlled with feelings of self-worth, perceived ability, internal motivation, persistence, positive social relationships, and academic achievement (Deci & Ryan, 2012). Researchers working within SDT have also devised a variety of instructional strategies to support students’ autonomy, including providing choice, explaining rationale for requirements, and acknowledging students’ negative emotions (Reeve, 2011).

The assumption that teacher support of students’ autonomy is an adaptive feature of instructional contexts is the starting point of Katz and colleagues’ (2015, this issue) study which examines autonomous motivation (i.e. studying because of understanding the value of the subject rather than to win a prize or earn an external reward). Teachers who believed that autonomous motivation among students is desirable, and who have autonomous motivation for their teaching, were more likely to report adopting an autonomy supportive style in the teaching. A teacher’s autonomous motivation purportedly reflects the extent to which his or her needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy are satisfied through interactions with students, administrators and colleagues. The findings highlight the importance of supporting teachers’ psychological needs in their own microsystem, to promote their motivation and capacity to create autonomy supportive instructional contexts for their students. Adaptive work environments for teachers require the integration of positive social relationships, support for competence, and support for agency.

The role of school psychologists in promoting adaptive instructional contexts

A child’s learning and development occurs within a complex network of interpersonal relationships and multileveled social structures (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). The articles featured in this special issue, as well as findings from numerous studies, indicate that social relationships, support for competence, and support for agency are important facets of educational social networks. Some facets may be more salient than others in different contexts, at different times, and for different students. Teachers must create instructional contexts that respond to contextualized and shifting psychological needs but may lack the necessary skills or supports to do so effectively. By adopting an ecological perspective and working to influence multiple levels of a child’s social context (e.g. child’s motivation, teachers’ efficacy, district-level policies related to teacher autonomy), a school psychologist may be able to have a greater impact on student outcomes and well-being.

Within school systems, teachers have a critical influence on students, and, by supporting teachers, school psychologists may be able to positively impact students’ microsystems and exosystems. By building teachers’ skills in interpersonal interactions with students and in forming supportive classroom climate (e.g. via consultation), school psychologists can improve students’ microsystems. Moreover, in the United States, the National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) Blueprint for Training and Practice states that building systems’ capacity for prevention should be a primary focus of school psychology practice that will improve student outcomes (Ysseldyke et al., 2006). Accordingly, school psychologists can improve students’ exsosystems by working with administrators to ensure that district policies support positive student-teacher relationships, student and teacher competence, and student and teacher agency. Such advocacy on behalf of teachers is particularly crucial in the current educational climate with its increased emphasis on accountability, high-stakes testing, and educational policies that may limit the autonomy and threaten the job security of teachers. By helping teachers to build their skills (e.g. via assessment and consultation) and by supporting teachers through district- and, perhaps, state- or national-level advocacy, school psychologists can become influential agents in the children’s microsystems and exosystems (and in the teacher’s microsystem). In this way, using an ecological model to improve the context of instruction has the potential to enhance the number of children who reap benefits from school psychological services as well as the magnitude of the benefits that children receive.

Footnotes

Author biographies

Laura L. Pendergast, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of School Psychology at Temple University, USA. Her research focuses on psychological and educational assessment across cultural groups. She is actively involved with projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Society for the Study of School Psychology. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychological Assessment, School Psychology Review, and The Journal of School Psychology.

Avi Kaplan, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Temple University, USA. Previously, he was Chair of School Counseling and a faculty member of School Psychology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His research concerns student and teacher motivation, self-regulation, and identity development. He is the Editor of the Journal of Experimental Education, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Educational Psychology and Contemporary Educational Psychology.

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