Engaging Students in Learning Activities: It Is Not Autonomy Support or Structure but Autonomy Support and Structure

We investigated 2 engagement-fostering aspects of teachers ’ instructional styles—autonomy support and structure—and hypothesized that students ’ engagement would be highest when teachers pro-vided high levels of both. Trained observers rated teachers ’ instructional styles and students’ behavioral engagement in 133 public high school classrooms in the Midwest, and 1,584 students in Grades 9 –11 reported their subjective engagement. Correlational and hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed 3 results: (a) Autonomy support and structure were positively correlated, (b) autonomy support and structure both predicted students ’ behavioral engagement, and (c) only autonomy support was a unique predictor of students ’ self-reported engagement. We discuss, first, how these findings help illuminate the relations between autonomy support and structure as 2 complementary, rather than antagonistic or curvilinear, engagement-fostering aspects of teachers’ instructional styles and, second, the somewhat different results obtained for the behavioral versus self-report measures of students ’ classroom engagement