Teachers’ engaging messages: The role of perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness

Abstract

“If you work hard you will learn interesting facts”.“Unless you work hard you will get into trouble”. These are examples of engaging messages teachers use to encourage engagement among their students. These kind of messages have been recently addressed by researchers, yet the reason why teachers use certain messages remains unexplored. This study aimed to identify profiles of teachers’ engaging messages and how these relate to their basic needs and students’ performance. The sample comprised 48 teachers and 1150 students. At the student-level, latent profile analysis showed three profiles: the gain-framed messages (GFM), the few-messages (FM), and the all-messages (AM) profiles. At the teacher-level, multilevel profile analysis showed an active and a passive profile. Results also indicated that teachers’ basic psychological needs were related to their use of engaging messages and this was related to students’ performance.