Relationship between autonomy support and students’ school well-being: the mediating role of need for competence

Within a Self-Determination Theory perspective (SDT; Deci and Ryan, 2000), this study aims to examinethe relationship between students’ perception of autonomy support provided by teachers and their schoolwell-being (439 students, mean age = 12.2 years; 51% male). SDT proposed the existence of threeuniversal, innate psychological needs of all human beings: autonomy, relatedness and competence. In theschool context, the need for autonomy refers to students’ desires to experience a sense ofself-determination of their behavior. The need for relatedness refers to students’ desires to experience asense of connection with teachers and classmates. The need for competence refers to students’ desires tointeract effectively with the school environment. The satisfaction of these needs plays an important role inseveral educational outcomes (e.g. school satisfaction and motivation), particularly when teachers supportstudents’ autonomy, attempting to understand, acknowledge, and where possible, be responsive tostudents’ perspectives. In the school specific domain, many recent empirical studies have used the SDT asa conceptual framework, to show that an autonomy-supportive teaching style tends to predict adolescentsstudents’ needs satisfaction and school well-being (Ryan and Deci, 2020). Satisfaction of need forcompetence seems to be a particularly strong predictor of adolescent students’ subjective well-being atschool (Tian, Han and Huebner, 2014). According to Tian (2008), subjective well-being in schoolincludes students’ school satisfaction and affect, that is the frequency with which students experiencepositive emotions.In Italy, research based on the SDT in schools is limited, particularly as regards the effect of students’needs satisfaction on their well-being. The present paper looks carefully at the mediating role of need forcompetence considering the relation between the support for autonomy provided by teachers and theadolescents students’ positive and pleasant emotions at school, using a Structural Equation Modelling.The posited model fitted the data quite well: x² = 225 (df = 101), p< .001; TLI = .968; SRMR = 0.037;RMSEA = 0.053, 90% CI [.044, .062]. Results show that a greater perception of support for autonomyhas a positive effect on the students’ positive emotions, and this effect is partially mediated by thesatisfaction of the need for competence. This finding suggest that students’ psychological needs should beconsidered and teachers should not only be aware of the importance of autonomy-supportive teaching, butalso of how they can improve their teaching style (Vandenkerckhove et al., 2019).