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

from the analysis had no relevant positive effect on the Cronbach’s alpha, we decided to retain the controlled motivation scale for further analysis. Similar to previous research [29, 31] we calculated composite scores of autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation. Student-perceived application of mastery climate teaching strategies. To assess to what extent different mastery climate teaching strategies were applied by the teacher during PE according to students, we employed a newly constructed questionnaire, the Mastery Teaching Perception Questionnaire (MTP-Q). The initial items were generated by the authors of this study and based on the guidelines and suggestions of the TARGET framework literature [10, 11, 22, 24–26]. The MTP-Q started with 33-items representing teaching strategies within the TARGET framework structures. Since the Time structure is considered inextricably linked to the task and evaluation structure [10], and relatively abstract to operationalize independently, we chose not to query the time structure as a separate structure in this study. After the items were pilot tested in a target age group (N = 8) for feasibility and comprehensibility, they were subjected to an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using SPSS version 26.0. A principal compo- nent method with Promax for oblique rotation (because factors were assumed to be correlated) was used to explore the underlying theoretical structure (i.e., task, authority, recognition, grouping and evaluation structure). Prior, the KMO measure verified the sample adequacy for

the analysis with a value of .96 and a significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity (p < 0.001). The EFA yielded five factors with an eigenvalue above 1, explaining 57,47% of the variance in the mastery climate teaching strategy items. After rotation, these factors could be interpreted as representing the task, authority, recognition, grouping and evaluation structure. All items loaded with interpretable factor loadings with absolute values greater than .40 [36]. Items that cross-loaded substantially with other factors were first critically and independently reviewed on face and content validity by four experts in the fields of didactics and motivation in PE, and subsequently discussed. As a result, seven items were deleted and three items were moved to a different TARGET construct. The questionnaire was reduced to 26 items (see S1 Question- naire) representing the motivational mastery climate structures of task (6 items; e.g., ‘There is plenty of variety and alternation in the PE lessons’), authority (5 items; e.g., ‘Our PE teacher provides opportunities for all students to deliver input and ideas during PE lessons’), recogni- tion (5 items; e.g., ‘Our PE teacher provides me with personal attention and feedback as much as possible’), grouping (5 items; e.g., ‘During the grouping process our PE teacher ensures that all students feel equally valued and that no-one is excluded’), and evaluation (5 items; e.g., ‘During assessment within PE, student differences (e.g., height, weight, strength) are taken

into account’). After an introduction in which it was explained that the purpose of the ques- tionnaire was to gain insight into how the student experienced PE in general last school year, students rated each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The internal consistency reliability coefficients (α) for these subscales were satisfactory with Cronbach’s alphas of .79, .79, .85, .80, and .82 for task, authority, recognition, grouping and evaluation, respectively. We also created a composite mastery teaching strategy score by averaging the respective scores of the task, authority, recognition, grouping and evalua- tion structure to test our hypothesis that higher levels of perceived mastery climate teaching strategies would relate positively to autonomous forms of motivation and lower levels primar- ily relate to controlled forms of motivation and amotivation. Data analysis. Preliminary analyses consisted of descriptive analyses (means and standard deviations) and the calculation of Pearson’s bivariate correlations to explore the relationships between the perceived mastery climate teaching strategies and motivation types of students. We explored whether adjusting for the multilevel nested structure of our data (students nested within teachers and teachers within schools) would lead to improvements in the quality of our 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 5 / 14