TARGETing secondary school students’ motivation towards physical education: The role of student-perceived mastery climate teaching strategies

for student behaviour, and tailored guidance and support is missing or insufficient, resulting in a perceived lack of structure by students [6]. Several studies (e.g., [46, 47]) have demon- strated that teacher structure is imperative for more adaptive motivational outcomes. Yet, on the other side of the spectrum, teachers should avoid (over) structuring and becoming too directive, since this could result in a demotivating, controlling teaching style. Taken together, this implies that within the authority structure of TARGET, the PE teacher should be con- stantly aiming for a functional balance of supporting students’ autonomy and providing ample structure. The TARGET structures are considered to function interdependently, which argues for an integrative approach while teaching [10]. However, there is still debate on how these structures interact, and whether they operate in an additive or a multiplicative manner. If the structures are additive, they become complementary and can compensate for each other. In other words, students can still perceive the learning environment as motivating (i.e., mastery climate), despite inadequacies in some TARGET structures. Deficiencies in for example the evaluation structure could then be attenuated by strengths in the recognition structure. However, if these structures would work in a multiplicative manner, this compensation mechanism does not apply, and all TARGET structures would need to be mastery-focused for students to perceive an overall motivating climate. The work of [18, 42] suggested the existence of an additive rela-

tionship between the TARGET teaching structures. These suggestions, however, were primar- ily based on logical reasoning rather than statistical analyses. The absence of meaningful, significant interaction effects between the TARGET variables in the present study now lends statistical support to the additive relationship proposition. Based on this insight, teachers could focus on the implementation of mastery climate teaching strategies within selected TAR- GET structures, rather than focusing on all TARGET structures at the same time. Especially for unexperienced teachers this could reduce the complexity of PE teaching practice. The mastery TARGET teaching strategies seem to have little to no impact on controlled motivation, in contrast to our findings on autonomous motivation and amotivation. Appar- ently, the levels of mastery teaching strategies do not seem to influence students’ feelings of external pressure (i.e., external motivational regulation) and internal pressure (i.e., internal motivational regulation). Although this result is in line with the study of [17], who found no relation between the motivational climate and external regulation, we cannot provide a logical or research-based explanation for this finding. We therefore support the call of Garcı´a-Gonza´- lez and colleagues [17] that there is a need for studies that investigate the impact of the TAR- GET teaching strategies on the different motivational subtypes distinguished in SDT. Strengths and limitations To our knowledge, this is the first study in which the TARGET framework was operationalised

into a validated questionnaire, to examine how perceived teaching strategies within the TAR- GET structures independently or interactively impact on secondary school students’ motiva- tion. We believe our findings provide support for, and a detailed insight into the additive mechanistic nature of the TARGET structures. However, this study is not without limitations. First, the application of the TARGET teaching strategies was determined by the perceptions of students only. Therefore, we have no objective data on the actual application of the teaching strategies. Second, although we found statistically significant results, the moderate amount of explained variance in our models suggests that there are other variables affecting students’ motivation within PE, in addition to the perceived TARGET teaching strategies. The present study does not allow to determine the nature of these variables. Third, by including students through a convenience sample of volunteering PE teachers from our university network, the PLOS ONE Impact of perceived teaching strategies on student motivation in secondary physical education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274964 September 22, 2022 11 / 14