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

models and in the estimates of individual parameters. First, one-way ANOVAs revealed that variation between the 12 schools was not statistically significant (F = 0.86, F = 0.85, and F = 0.85 for autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation, respectively). Also, variations between the 55 teachers were not statistically significant (F = 1.12, F = 1.14 and F = 0.90 for autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation, respec- tively). Second, we explored whether adding between-school variance as a fixed factor would increase the quality of the model, but for all motivational constructs this was not the case (p >.05). Third, we compared the quality of intercept-only models without- and with the addi- tion of a random intercept for schools and for teachers. Results showed that for both schools and teachers, differences between both models were not statistically significant (i.e., -2 log like- lihood difference-score between models ranged between 0.12 and 1.37; p >.05). Therefore, we decided to conduct ordinary least squares multivariate regression analysis using SPSS version 26.0. After examining the assumptions of normality, linearity, homoscedasticity and absence of multicollinearity [34], we first conducted a series of three regression analyses (for each of the motivational outcomes) to determine the combined influences of the teaching strategies within all TARGET structures (i.e., mastery teaching strategy composite score) on students’ motivation. Subsequently, three series of hierarchical regression were performed to investigate

the extent to which each of the five TARGET structure could predict the motivation of stu- dents. As gender, age, and educational type are known to potentially affect students’ motiva- tion [37, 38] these variables were entered in the first step of each regression analysis to control for their effects. In the second step of this regression, the student-perceived mastery climate teaching strategies were simultaneously entered to examine whether they could account for additional variance of students’ motivation. We analysed the influence of each TARGET struc- ture while controlling for all other TARGET structures to reveal independent influences on students’ motivation. Finally, we also explored whether individual TARGET structures inter- acted with each other in predicting students’ motivation. Therefore, we computed two-way interaction terms between the TARGET variables. Results Descriptive statistics and correlational analysis Means, standard deviations, internal consistency reliability coefficients, and bivariate correla- tions for all study variables are presented in Table 1. Student motivation for PE is more auton- omously regulated (3.56) rather than controlled (2.09), with amotivation showing similar scores to controlled motivation (2.15). Regarding the student-perceived application of mastery climate teaching strategies, the students reported the highest mean scores on recognition (3.66) and task (3.56) strategies and the lowest mean score on authority (3.00). For the group- ing and evaluation strategies mean scores above the scale midpoint, of respectively 3.37 and

3.44 were reported. Positive and significant correlations (Table 1) between perceived mastery climate teaching strategies and autonomous motivation were found. In contrast, amotivation was significantly negatively correlated with perceived mastery climate teaching strategies. Cor- relations between the teaching strategies and controlled motivation were either low or negligible. Regression analyses To test our hypothesis in which we assumed that higher levels of overall student-perceived mastery climate teaching strategies would relate positively to autonomous forms of motivation, and negatively to controlled forms of motivation and amotivation, we conducted linear regres- sions based on the composite mastery teaching strategy score (M = 3.40; SD = .65). For 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 6 / 14