Student Engagement in Learning: Exploring the Role of Perceived Student Cohesiveness, Equity, Teacher Support, and Teacher Autonomy Support Under the Framework of Self-Determination Theory

Abstract

The academic achievement of secondary students remains a top goal for an increasing number of parents, teachers, administrators, students, and policymakers. This is because students with high academic learning outcomes gain a lot in the long run, including future admission success in college or university and later in the workforce. As a result, all educational stakeholders must focus on figuring out how to raise student academic achievement. One of the promising avenues to increase academic achievement is student engagement. According to self-determination theory (SDT), satisfying a student’s need for relatedness, autonomy, and competence is one of the conditions for raising student engagement. This study therefore, mainly examined how classroom environment of student cohesiveness (SC), equity (EQ), teacher support (TS), and teacher autonomy support (TAS) predicts behavioral engagement (BE), cognitive engagement (CE), emotional engagement (EE) and agentic engagement (AE) of students.  Data were collected from 305 students (150 males and 155 females) in four purposively selected secondary schools in the Nyamagabe district of Rwanda. The four subscales from the What Is Happening In this Class (WIHIC) questionnaire, the Learning Climate Questionnaire (LCQ), and the Student Engagement Scale (SES) were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using the Mean and SD, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and regression analyses. Based on the results, the SC, TS, EQ, and TAS were significantly related to all components of student engagement (BE, CE, EE, and AE). There was a significant difference between boys’ and girls’ perceptions of BE and TAS. Gender, SC, and EQ predict BE; TAS predict CE, EQ, and TAS predicted EE; and SC, TS, and TAS predict AE. Thus, responding to students’ SC, TS, EQ, and TAS needs is crucial as they can foster student engagement in various aspects.

Received: 7 October 2024 | Revised: 4 March 2025 | Accepted: 7 April 2025 

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest in this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data used to support the findings of this study are available upon request to the corresponding author.  

Author Contribution Statement

Emmanuel Bizimana: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing–original draft, Writing–review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.