The relationships between perceived teacher autonomy support, academic self-efficacy and learning engagement among primary school students: A network analysis

Learning engagement is malleable to environmental change. An important learning environment created by teacher-student interactions is perceived teacher autonomy support, which may trigger learning engagement directly and/or indirectly by enhancing academic self-efficacy. In this study, we apply a network approach to explore the relationships between the specific facets of perceived teacher autonomy support, academic self-efficacy and learning engagement, and a sample consisting of 215 students in the fifth and sixth grades from a primary school in Changchun of China is used. Node centrality indicators and the accuracy and stability of the network are also calculated. The results reveal that there are no edges between the three facets of perceived teacher autonomy support and the three facets of learning engagement, and the shortest path connecting the two constructs is through academic ability self-efficacy. Furthermore, learning support, academic ability self-efficacy, and dedication have the top three strengths in the network, which indicates that the three facets are more closely related to other facets of the network.