INFLUENCES ON TEACHERS: EDUCATIONAL POLICY

It is clear from the research reviewed herein that teachers' behavior, specifically, the degree to which they are autonomy supportive versus controlling, has an important effect on students' motivation and selfdetermination. Therefore it is important to understand whether any factors (other than teacher individual differences) influence the extent to which they will act in autonomy-supportive versus controlling ways. Several studies have been done to investigate this issue, and two important sources of influence have been identified. The first source relates to pressures that are placed on teachers by demands in the school organization, and the second source relates to influences, whether real or imagined, from students.

Deci, Spiegel, Ryan, Koestner, and Kauffman (1982) argued that when teachers are pressured or controlled by their superiors or by the system in general, they are likely to respond by being more controlling with their students. These researchers performed a study in which half the teachers were pressured (by being reminded that it was their responsibility to be sure their students performed up to high standards) and half were not. Results indicated that teachers who had been pressured were dramatically more controlling with their students than those who had not been pressured. Fink, Boggiano, and Barrett (1990) did a complementary study and found similar results. Further, in these studies there was evidence that when the teachers became more controlling the students performed less well in problem-solving activities, both during the teaching session and subsequently.

Pressure from administrators to make sure students perform up to standards is just one kind of pressure that teachers experience. Government agencies, parent groups, and other forces outside the school system bring pressure to bear on school administrators and teachers alike, and all of these intrusions on the teachers' sense of self-determination are likely to lead them to be more controlling with their students. That, in turn, will have negative effects on the students' self-determination, conceptual learning, and personal adjustment.

The other interesting source of influence on teachers' behavior is the students themselves, or the teachers' beliefs about the students. In one experiment, Jelsma (1982) found that when students (who were actually experimental accomplices) were somewhat fidgety and inattentive during a teaching session, their teachers became more controlling than when the same students !were more attentive. It appears that students who are highly motivated and autonomous in school may elicit more autonomy support from their teachers, whereas students who are more distracted and less motivated may elicit more controlling behaviors from the teachers.

A recent experiment by Pelletier and Vallerand (1989) took this reasoning one step further to test the self-fulfilling prophecy effect (e.g., Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Snyder, 1984) with regard to motivation. Pelletier and Vallerand suggested that if teachers think some students are intrinsically motivated and self-determined, the teachers will be more autonomy supportive with those students, presumably believing the students will regulate themselves. On the other hand, if the teachers think other students are extrinsically motivated and less self-determined, they will be more controlling with those students, presumably believing they have to make the

students perform. In the experiment, some "teacher-subjects" were told that the students they were about to teach how to solve puzzles were extrinsically motivated, whereas others were told that their students were intrinisically motivated. Teachers who had been led to believe that the students were extrinsically motivated were very controlling toward the students, which in turn led the students to display low levels of intrinsic motivation toward the puzzles. On the other hand, teachers who thought that they were interacting with intrinsicalliy motivated students were more autonomy supportive, and their students showed high levels of intrinsic motivation. Thus, the teachers' beliefs about th~es tudent's motivation (which had been randomly assigned) actually created their own reality.

Educational Policy: Future Directions

Classrooms are embedded in schools; schools are embedded in communities and society. As the aforementioned research by Deci et al. (1982) suggests, pressures fromi schools, communities, and society for teachers to be more accountable for students' achievement can lead teachers to be more controlling and thus can be counterproductive for the goals of conceptual understanding and personal growth. Maehr (1991) made the complementary point thatdassroom practices are dictated to a large degree by school policies. From our perspective, the extent to which the school context is more autonomy supportive, rather than controlling, will directly affect the extent to which teachers support the autonomy of their students. This issue, with its many ramifications, needs much further work, because the schoolsystem is clearly an appropriate level for much educational reform. This is particularly so because the rhetoric from Washington continues to advocate greater accountability, greater discipline, and increased use of standardized testing, all of which are means of exerting greater pressure and control on the educational process and therefore are likely to have at least some negative consequences.