Intervention-enabled autonomy-supportive teaching improves the PE classroom climate to reduce antisocial behavior

Background: Autonomy-supportive teaching interventions enhance PE student outcomes. According to previous research, these benefits occur because autonomy-supportive teaching enhances students' psychological needs, though they may also occur because such teaching enhances the classroom climate. The student benefit of interest was reduced classroom-wide antisocial behavior.Objectives: We predicted that teacher participation in the intervention would enhance both classroom climate and psychological needs assessed at the classroom level. We further predicted that improvements in the classroom climate would better explain decreased antisocial behavior.Method: Using a cluster randomized control trial design with longitudinally-assessed dependent measures, we randomly assigned 49 physical education secondary-grade Korean teachers to participate (or not) in an autonomy-supportive teaching intervention (25 experimental, 24 control). The 1487 students in these 49 classrooms reported their individually-experienced need satisfaction and frustration and their classroom-level supportive climate, conflictual climate, and antisocial behavior across three waves.Results: A series of doubly latent multilevel structural equation modeling analyses showed that, at the classroom level, (1) intervention-enabled autonomy-supportive teaching improved both students' psychological needs (more satisfaction, beta = 0.84; less frustration, beta = -0.66) and the prevailing classroom climate (more supportive, beta = 0.77; less conflictual, beta = -0.68) and (2) the improved climate best explained why antisocial behavior declined (overall R2 = 0.86).Conclusion: These findings show the importance of incorporating classroom climate effects to understand why autonomy-supportive teaching interventions improve student outcomes.