Need-supportive teaching is associated with reading achievement via intrinsic motivation across eight cultures

Self-determination theory (SDT) posits that need-supportive teaching, which includes support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness facilitates motivation and achievement across cultures. However, prior evidence of SDT's cross-cultural generalizability were drawn from a limited set of cultural contexts. Furthermore, prior work has mainly focused on autonomy-support. This study used data from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (N = 578,168). Countries were grouped following Schwartz’ (2009) eight cultural clusters. Results found that need-supportive teaching predicted achievement via intrinsic motivation across the eight cultural groups. However, the magnitude of the associations among the variables varied across cultures. Findings also indicated a positive association between need-supportive teaching and achievement in six out of the eight cultural groups. However, a different pattern was observed in East-Central Europe (non-significant association) and Africa and the Middle East (negative association). This study offers broad, though not unanimous, support for SDT's cultural generalizability.