The affective domain has received increasing attention in education and educational research due to the reported growing prevalence of mental health issues among young people. In the physical education context, the self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci, 2017) outlined optimal teaching styles to promote students’ motivation and psychological well-being and facilitated views representative of mental health. This study aimed to explore characteristics of physical education teachers associated with optimal teaching styles for affective learning.

The SDT argues that people have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Support of these needs is required to foster positive learning processes, such as motivation and psychological well-being. Previous studies have demonstrated that need-supportive styles, including autonomy-support and structure, in physical education satisfy the three psychological needs, leading to affective learning outcomes, whereas need-thwarting styles, including control and chaos, produce less desirable outcomes (Behzadnia et al., 2018; Haerens et al., 2015). 

Recent research has shifted to focus on antecedents to investigate why teachers adopt need-supportive and need-thwarting styles. Antecedents of teaching styles have been examined in relation to teachers’ perceived pressures from above, below, and within. A recent study revealed that teachers are likely to adopt need-supportive styles when perceived pressures from below and within are reduced, whereas need-thwarting styles could be predicted by the prevalence of pressures from above and within (Escriva-Boulley, Haerens, et al., 2021). Therefore, the adoption of teaching styles could be closely associated with the degree of perceived pressures from within, such as teachers’ own beliefs, values, and personal dispositions (Reeve, 2009).

The Causality Orientation Theory, which is a sub-theory of the SDT, identifies antecedents that influence teaching styles, including three causality dimensions: autonomy, control, and impersonal orientations (Ryan and Deci, 2017). Autonomy orientation refers to individuals focusing on events and perceiving the environment as a source of information, considering their own needs, interests, and values. Control orientation reflects the tendency to be controlled by external events, such as rewards, deadlines, and punishments. Impersonal orientation indicates the tendency to interpret actions as beyond one’s intentional control and not understand the reasons behind one’s actions. As such, we hypothesised that teachers with an autonomy orientation would employ need-supportive styles and rely less on need-thwarting styles, whereas teachers with control and impersonal orientations would adopt need-thwarting styles and utilise need-supportive styles less.

Studies examining the influence of causality orientation on need-supportive and need-thwarting styles are scarce, and the few extant studies have not attempted to examine this relationship among secondary schools’ physical education teachers. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the role of causality orientations in adopting need-supportive and need-thwarting styles in physical education.

We conducted a web-based questionnaire survey between August and September 2022. The participants were recruited through a request letter, which contained a link to the survey, posted to 1,200 randomly chosen secondary schools across Japan. The survey site provided information regarding the purpose of the study, voluntary participation, freedom to withdraw, protection of personal data, and use of data in research. Only individuals who provided informed consent to participate in the study were allowed to proceed to the questionnaire. This study was approved by the ethics committee of the research university. The questionnaires contained the Situations-in-School-PE (SIS-PE) scale (Escriva-Boulley, Guillet-Descas, et al., 2021) to assess four dimensions of teaching styles: autonomy support, structure, control, and chaos. We translated the SIS-PE into Japanese with the approval of the original authors, utilising back translation to ensure accuracy. The SIS-PE describes 12 teaching situations that commonly occur during physical education lessons, with four different ways that a teacher might respond to the situation. The teachers were asked to indicate how well each action describes their own style using a seven-point Likert scale (1 = does not describe me at all; 7 = describes me extremely well). Cronbach’s alpha of the Japanese version was .76 for autonomy support, .84 for structure, .81 for control, and .80 for chaos. In addition, the Japanese version of the General Causality Orientation Scale (J-GCOS; Tobe et al., 2016) was used to measure teachers’ autonomy, control, and impersonal orientations. The J-GCOS consists of 12 situations in daily life, with three different responses that reflect the three causality orientations. The teachers were asked to indicate the degree of agreement using a seven-point Likert scale (1 = completely disagree; 7 = completely agree). Cronbach’s alpha of the Japanese version was .74 for autonomy orientation, .60 for control orientation, and .70 for impersonal orientation. Valid responses were obtained from 302 teachers (231 men and 71 women, M teaching experience = 11.2 years). We conducted regression analyses to examine the relationships between causality orientation and teaching styles. Gender, age, and teaching experiences were the control variables. Variables with no meaningful zero value were grand mean centred.

As for the teacher background variables, female teachers scored significantly lower in the adoption of structure, control, and chaos than male teachers. The differences in teaching styles according to teacher sex could raise issues surrounding the gender balance in the school workplace. In Japan, approximately 70% of physical education teachers are male (MEXT, 2018). It might be practical to appoint more female teachers to create a comfortable teaching environment and positively impact pupils’ affective learning. The results revealed that autonomy-oriented teachers were likely to engage in autonomy support and structure (i.e., need-supportive styles) and disengage in chaos. In addition, control and impersonal orientations were significantly correlated with the adoption of control and chaos (i.e., need-thwarting styles). These results suggested that autonomy orientation could facilitate the adoption of need-supportive styles, and the relationship may be mediated by autonomous forms of motivation (Hagger and Hamilton, 2021). In contrast, control and impersonal orientations could predict need-thwarting styles due to the belief that external pressures and control, such as rewards and threats, are effective in motivating students (Reeve, 2009). The findings could guide teacher professional development, including pre-service teacher training, by raising awareness regarding beliefs that promote need-supportive versus need-thwarting teaching styles. Given the fact that the participants in this study were not informed of the results, they remained unaware of their own behavioural tendencies. In the future, however, these findings will need to be introduced into physical education teacher education programmes to promote behaviour changes through a process of awareness and reflection of one’s own beliefs and tendencies. Adopting optimal teaching styles would lead to greater affective learning achievement and better mental health among students (Ryan and Deci, 2020).

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