BACKGROUND Students' perspective on education is of crucial importance for its effectivity, but students' opinions are seldom acknowledged by teachers and designers. Student participation in the educational design process could be a suitable tool to better take students' preferences into account. However, for effective participatory design, it is necessary to know whether students have stable p...

Two studies examined student psychological need satisfaction as a predictor of positive teacher-course evaluations. In Study 1, 268 undergraduates recalled and rated the quality of a recent important college course, then rated their feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within that course. Consistent with self-determination theory, all three ratings predicted instructor and/or cours...

This dissertation focuses on how student motivation emerges and changes in the day-today classroom context. Drawing on self-determination theory, it proposes that specific features of the classroom instruction—and of what teachers say and do—may either support or frustrate students’ need for autonomy. Autonomy-supportive instruction is hypothesized to enhance interest and competence perception ...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family background is a strong predictor of student performance in South Korea and Singapore, while Hong Kon...

In any given learning context, there are constraints on the development of learner autonomy. However, this does not mean that developing autonomy is not feasible. In this paper, I firstly describe student passivity in Bachelor of Arts Graduation Paper (BAGP) writing in a four-year BA Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) program in a Chinese teachers’ university. I then present how stud...

Abstract The great shift of paradigm from teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness has one major rationale in line with the definitions of autonomy, i.e., the capacity and willingness to act independently and in cooperation with others, so cooperation is looked upon as the manifestation of autonomy. In the present study, the researchers investigated the impact of training cooperative...