Teachers' autonomy support and student engagement: A systematic literature review of longitudinal studies

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.

Automated summary

This study is a systematic literature review on the relationship between autonomy support and student engagement. The study found an increasing number of research on this topic in recent years, with a focus on the United States and Korea. Most studies recruited participants from upper secondary schools and used questionnaires for data collection. Structural equation models were commonly applied for data analysis. However, there is a lack of concrete autonomy-supportive teaching strategies in the studies. Therefore, more longitudinal studies on specific teaching strategies are needed to maximize student engagement.