The Effectiveness of Web-Based Need-Supportive Intervention Program for Physical Education Teachers on Students’ Physical Activity-Related Cognitive and Behavioural Outcomes

The aim of this study was to examine whether the developed intervention program (IP) for physical education (PE) teachers would reveal significant differences between the experimental and control group students’ study characteristics (i.e., perceived autonomy support, competence support, relatedness support, and controlling behaviour from teachers, students’ satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs (BPN), autonomous motivation towards physical activity (PA) in PE and leisure time and self-reported PA). A total of 1283 students (553 boys, 725 girls, no defined gender 5) from middle-schools in [masked for blinded review] took part in the survey. PE teachers with their students were randomly assigned into either an experimental (teachers n=36; students n=463) or control (teachers n=49; students n=820) group. The survey was designed as follows: following the completion of an online questionnaire by students from both groups, PE teachers of the experimental group participated in a 4-week long online training program and the subsequent 4-week implementation period. Nine weeks after the intervention aimed to the PE teachers, the students from both groups answered to the online questionnaire for the second time. The results of the analysis of covariance indicated that the students in the experimental group perceived the autonomy support (p=0.044), competence support (p=0.007) and relatedness support (p=0.044) statistically significantly higher than the students in the control group at follow up. The results indicated that the created web-based intervention was effective in promoting supportive teacher behaviour.