Web-Based and Face-To-Face Autonomy-Supportive Intervention for Physical Education Teachers and Students' Experiences

The most of the previous autonomy-supportive interventions con-ducted have been partially effective and used only web-based or face-to-face approach. In the current study, a combined web-based and face-to-face intervention for physical education (PE) teachers was tested to examine whether it would lead to signifi-cant changes in students' self-reports of autonomy-supportive and controlling behaviours, psychological need satisfaction and frus-tration, and intrinsic motivation. Participants were 57 PE teachers (M-age = 45.70, SD = 12.79) and their 858 middle-school students (M-age = 13.22, SD = 0.75). A randomized controlled design was adopted in which PE teachers and their students were assigned to the combined face-to-face and web-based, face-to-face alone, web-based alone or control group. Face-to-face intervention was provided to PE teachers within one day in an 8-hour workshop and web-based intervention was provided to PE teachers for a pe-riod of four weeks. The combined face-to-face and web-based in-tervention group was the only study group that demonstrated sta-tistically significant changes in all the study variables (i.e., signif-icant increase in cognitive, organisational, and procedural auton-omy-supportive behaviour, in psychological need satisfaction for autonomy, competence and relatedness, and in intrinsic motiva-tion, whereas significant decrease in intimidation, controlling use of grades, and negative conditional regard, and in psychological need frustration for autonomy, competence, and relatedness) compared to the control group at a one-month follow-up. There were no significant differences in any of the study variable, ex-cept organisational autonomy support and intimidation, between the web-based intervention group and face-to-face intervention group. Both web-based and face-to-face study group students re-ported significant gains in most of the study variables compared to the control group students at a one-month follow-up. The cur-rent findings suggest that future autonomy-supportive interven-tions for PE teachers should aim to use combined interventions of face-to-face and web-based approach to gain the greatest inter-vention effects.