**5. Creating autonomy supportive environments**

Although it is important to foster all three basic psychological needs when creating student-centered autonomy supportive learning environments, here I want to focus on autonomy and relatedness, the two needs that are often neglected in higher education. In education, great emphasis is often placed on the satisfaction of the need for competence. This is understandable given the context. But for optimal outcomes, for healthy functioning, the need for autonomy and relatedness will also be fostered. What we have found in our own research is that to create environments that are autonomy supportive in higher education, and to build competencies, these competencies have to be developed in an environment that also supports the needs for autonomy and relatedness [12, 13].

Basic psychological needs can be easily thwarted in environments that are not optimal. The need for competence is easily thwarted in environments that are too difficult or challenging, or where negative feedback is pervasive or when under persistent person focused criticism and social comparison. Persistent social comparison or person focused criticism will also thwart the need for autonomy and relatedness. These conditions, unfortunately, are often found in competitive environments such as higher education in STEM fields, such as math and engineering. Autonomy supportive environments are associated with factors that foster the satisfaction of the three needs and associated with subsequent positive outcomes, whereas controlling environments hinder the fulfillment of the three needs [14–17].

Research suggests that clusters of behaviors are typically demonstrated by autonomy supportive instructors. Autonomy supportive instructors tend to acknowledge and understand students' experiences and perspectives broadly, listen more, attend to students' interests, make fewer directives, resist giving students answers too quickly and are more responsive to students' questions and comments, as well as give them an opportunity to talk and express themselves [18]. These behaviors help instructors notice when students are struggling, or need extra support, which also fosters students' need for relatedness and competence. Autonomy supportive instructors also provide choices and options to students whenever possible, which could be as simple as letting the students choose their topic for a given assignment or giving them the option of demonstrating their knowledge through a presentation or a project. It could be to let students have the option to take a final exam or count one of the regular semester exams for more points. Instructors that are autonomy supportive make

time for students' independent work, and encourage as well as acknowledge signs of efforts, improvement, and mastery. They provide frequent and timely feedback and offer hints that foster progress when students are stuck, without overly directing their learning or immediately providing the answers. The feedback that they provide is informational, which means that it provides essential information to students to guide the improvement of their performance, master and develop skills, foster growth and a general sense of direction and competence.

In contrast, educators that are more controlling tend to make more demands, give more controlling directives, use directive types of questions as a way to control the flow of the conversation, and make frequent use of controlling language such as "should" and "have to". They tend to monopolize the learning material, provide students too little time to work independently on solving problems, and instead tell students the answers without giving them an opportunity to formulate their own. The feedback that they provide tends to be vague, pressuring, and is not informational, which means it does not provide opportunities for improvement, development, mastery, development, and growth, and in turn does not foster well-being [19].

Out of the list of behavioral markers described above, arguably one of the easiest and most meaningful to foster autonomy support is to provide choices and options to students, and to understand, acknowledge and take their perspective into consideration as they engage in a task. A meta-analysis reviewing 41 studies involving participants of different ages and for a variety of behaviors, demonstrated that the provision of choice enhances the need for autonomy, as well as effort, task performance, and perceived competence [20, 21]. The provision of choice also led the students to perceive the course as more valuable [22]. Even though the provision of choice in a variety of learning environments is associated with a host of positive outcomes, often instructors, especially in introductory required classes, feel compelled or obligated because of accreditation requirements, to teach a certain content in a specific way to ensure that the students will be prepared to succeed in the following course in the sequence or meet requirements. In these cases, provision of choices and options may not be possible, and supporting students' autonomy has to focus on other factors such as listening to students' perspective, giving students and opportunity to talk and being responsive to their comments and questions, encouraging students' effort and very importantly providing a meaningful rationale for the required and often difficult or boring academic work.

More recently, SDT researchers have extended this work by examining behaviors that would be associated not only with autonomy support, but also relatedness support and competence support, operationalized as the provision of structure [23]. In this work, the behaviors of being enthusiastic and eager and putting effort and energy into the class session were associated with relatedness support; the behaviors of giving clear instructions, offering the student a rationale for tasks, and providing positive feedback, were found to be associated with competence support (structure). Importantly, this work also demonstrated that the provision of a strong and meaningful rationale not only fosters the need for autonomy, but also provides competence support through the provision of structure [23]. It is often necessary for students to follow requirements and work within a structure for attainment of optimal outcomes. Understanding why this is necessary through the provision of a rationale is very important to foster self-determined motivation.

In higher education, choices are often limited because of accreditation requirements or course sequencing which puts pressure on instructors to cover certain material in certain courses. Therefore, the power of a meaningful rationale, to create environments that are autonomy supportive, cannot be understated in our work with

#### *Perspective Chapter: Fostering Students' Learning Experiences in Higher Education – Reflections… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110327*

faculty in higher education. When provision of choices and options for independent work is not possible, then the power of a meaningful and strong rationale is extremely important and fosters the internalization of the reasons for learning and in turn put more effort into their learning [24, 25].

In our recent research work around satisfaction of basic needs in higher education, we have taken a special interest in exploring the relative importance of the basic psychological needs, and how their intersection would influence motivational outcomes, learning outcomes and academic performance in higher education [26]. When instructors are first exposed to the importance of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they often wonder what it truly means to foster the basic psychological needs, especially the need for autonomy and relatedness. Research and experiences have provided several examples for the satisfaction for the need for autonomy, as I have discussed in this chapter. However, there is a lack of research examining the need for relatedness especially in higher education. Recent work around IMPACT has focused on the potential multidimensional nature of relatedness and the distinction between relatedness between the students themselves and the relatedness between the students and the instructor. One of the questions we have been asking is whether one aspect of relatedness is more important than the other in higher education. To answer this question, researchers in our lab have been conducting work to formally differentiate the two components of relatedness [27]. They created items to separately examine the connection students experience with their peers and their instructors. Results show that considering the potential multidimensional nature of relatedness is important. The extent to which students reported feeling connected with their instructor was most predictive of student interest and enjoyment in the course as well as self-reported effort. In contrast, peer relatedness was not significantly associated with any of the outcome variables.

Other novel and emerging work in SDT is specifically examining the intersection between autonomy supportive and culturally responsive environments. Early research shows that environments that are autonomy supportive can also be culturally responsive, inclusive, and respect the diversity of all students in the classroom and their lived experiences [28]. This work builds on research examining the psychosocial factors which influence the creation of positive learning environments including but not limited to teacher support, student support, and autonomy support [29–31].

This research has demonstrated and isolated the influence of four constructs fostering autonomy-supportive, culturally responsive learning environments: inclusiveness, cultural inclusion, diverse language and diverse pedagogy [28]. An autonomy-supportive learning environment which is also inclusive would fully include the students, allow them to communicate in their own language, be flexible, and adopt an open, warm, and curious attitude toward diversity and differences, which would allow instructors to gain a deep insight into the lived experiences and motives of their students.
