Purpose
High school leaders use credit recovery to help students graduate on time by allowing them to regain credit for courses they failed. Over the past 20 years, these offerings are increasingly being implemented through online credit recovery (OCR) programs using virtual platforms (Issue Brief: Credit Recovery, 2018; Tyner & Munyan-Penney, 2018; Viano, 2021). A primarily asynchronous, online learning environment offers administrators flexibility in how they provide opportunities to students to complete their OCR course including when students are given time to work on the course, ranging from traditional blocks during the school day to allowing students to work on them at their own pace outside of school (Murin et al., 2015). However, research is mixed on the effectiveness of OCR courses in improving student outcomes, including student engagement (Hart et al., 2019; Heinrich et al., 2019; Heinrich & Darling-Aduana, 2021; Rickles et al., 2018, 2023; Viano, 2021, 2023; Viano & Henry, 2024).
This current study uses Self-determination Theory (SDT), an Educational Psychology perspective, to explore if high school credit recovery programs are facilitated in ways that promote engagement in these virtual learning environments. SDT research suggests that student engagement and motivation increase in classrooms with higher levels of autonomy support and structure (Jang et al., 2010). While on the surface, OCR courses seem to be offer students more autonomy given that these courses are self-paced, no studies have explored whether classrooms in which students work on an OCR course while in-person are facilitated in autonomy-supportive ways. This study uses data collected as part of an NSF-funded research project to answer the following research questions:
1) To what extent are in-person OCR classrooms facilitated in autonomy-supportive ways, as defined by Self-determination Theory?
2) How engaged are students in these in-person OCR courses?
3) What patterns emerge between the levels of autonomy-supportive practices and student engagement observed in OCR classrooms?
Framework
School leaders currently take a number of different approaches to structuring and implementing their credit recovery programs. These range from requiring students to attend in-person OCR classrooms with a subject-matter expert teacher to allowing students to work on their own pace without supervision (Gemin & Pape, 2017; Murin et al., 2015). Considering that disengagement with learning is a commonly reported characteristic of students at-risk of failing to graduate on-time (Murin et al., 2015), it is important to understand how these different approaches influence student engagement. To do so, in this study we employ an educational psychological perspective on student engagement.
Self-determination theory is an empirically-based framework for understanding how the fulfillment or thwarting of one’s basic psychological needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – can lead to increases or decreases in one’s motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2020). In research conducted in secondary school classrooms, SDT commonly finds that supporting students’ sense of autonomy is positively associated with increased motivation and behavioral engagement (Cheon et al., 2020; Howard et al., 2024; Jang et al., 2010; Patall et al., 2018).
On the surface, OCR programs seem to offer increased student autonomy how flexible they are offered to students. However, the provision of autonomy support and structure in SDT are distinctly related to teachers’ instructional behaviors. Autonomy supportive practices are those that nurture students’ inner motivation and curiosity, and include examples such as using non-controlling language, offering choices, acknowledging student perspectives and feelings, incorporating student interests into lessons, and responding to student concerns using an informational, explanatory rationale (Jang et al., 2010). However, SDT research carefully stresses that providing students autonomy does not mean a hands-off, unstructured approach to teaching is best for engagement.
Research has shown that autonomy support and structure are not just positively correlated, but also they both predict students’ behavioral engagement (Jang et al., 2010, Patzak & Zhang, 2025). Examples of teacher provided structure include: the use of clear expectations and strong guidance during activities, scaffolding directions, developing clear schedules for student activities including transitions between them, providing task-focused and constructive feedback, as well as providing consistency during lessons (Jang et al., 2010). Because of this, it is unlikely that OCR classrooms are autonomy supportive just because they are more flexible, and a deeper look is needed to understand the extent that instruction in these courses provides autonomy support and structure.
This study explores what the provision of autonomy support and structure looks like in OCR classrooms. It follows a similar qualitative analysis that explored the extent of autonomy support and structure provided in secondary school physical education classes (Langdon et al., 2019). The authors of that study used SDT principles to identify autonomy-supportive teacher behaviors. In this current study we undertake a similar approach. Using a more recent classification system developed through a collaboration of SDT scholars (Ahmadi et al., 2023), we will classify the behaviors of OCR teachers in our study as autonomy-supportive or thwarting and compare that with patterns of student engagement in these classrooms.
Data Sources
Data for this study was collected during the 2024-2025 school year from a large, diverse, suburban school district in the mid-Atlantic region as part of an NSF-funded project. The research team gathered qualitative data exploring teacher practices in-person OCR courses along with quantitative data measuring student engagement in these classrooms. Across the eight high schools in the study, we completed 21 interviews and conducted 33 observations of in-person OCR classrooms.
We interviewed assistant principals, counselors, teacher leaders, teachers, and teaching assistants in charge of designing or implementing in-person OCR courses. Part of these semi-structured interviews assessed across-school differences in how OCR classrooms are facilitated across schools, including the instructional practices used to support student engagement. Via in-person observations, we collected additional qualitative data of how OCR classrooms were facilitated along with quantitative measurements of student engagement in real time.
Methods
Research Question 1: Autonomy-support in OCR classrooms
We address the first research question through our first cycle of qualitative analysis, where we use structural coding to identify examples of autonomy supportive teacher practices in the interview transcripts and the running support notes from our classroom observations. Using a recently developed classification system for teachers’ motivational behaviors according to Self-determination Theory principles (Ahmadi et al., 2023), we developed an a priori coding system to identify practices that support or thwart the provision of autonomy and structure in OCR classrooms. This process will help us identify the extent to which these classrooms support student autonomy, while also allowing us to capture examples of autonomy supportive practices that can illustrate best practices for promoting student engagement in OCR.
Research Question 2: Student engagement in OCR classrooms
We address the second research question with quantitative analysis of data from our observations of OCR classrooms. In each observation, we conducted student sweeps where we measured student on- and off-task behaviors in 15-minute intervals. We will use this data to determine the average percentage of on-task behaviors in each class we observed, based on the number of times students were on-task during our sweeps. This will serve as a measure of student engagement for each classroom.
Research Question 3: Patterns of autonomy-support and student engagement in OCR classrooms
In this next cycle of coding, we will develop use a matrix-analysis to qualitatively examine the relationship between autonomy supportive or thwarting behaviors and the levels of student engagement per classroom across the eight schools in our study. We will comprise the data we collected in response to the first two research questions to identify which classrooms had higher or lower levels of autonomy support, structure, and student engagement. Our aim in this part of the analysis is to highlight any patterns that emerge between the provision of autonomy support and structure, and student engagement. This descriptive analysis will help us identify which practices are more likely to promote student engagement in OCR classrooms.
Initial Findings
We are currently in the process of developing a structural codebook to guide the first part of our qualitative analysis. At this point, we only have initial observations of teacher practices that address the first research question. These examples illustrate what student autonomy-supportive or thwarting practices look like in the OCR classrooms we observed. These findings come from a preliminary review of our data and are not comprehensive of all the behaviors we observed. We will be finished with the remaining analyses by the start of the conference next summer.
Examples of autonomy supportive behaviors observed include:
• Students are allowed to choose which assignments/tasks to work on at their own pace.
• Teachers use pleasant, welcoming tones when working with students or redirecting their behavior.
• Some students expressed they feel less pressure in these settings than in a traditional classroom.
• Teacher provides rationale for why a student has to complete a particular assignment.
• Teacher offers student choice of preferred break activity.
• Teacher offered a student who completed their course a choice to work ahead on the next course or take a break.
• Teachers help students learn in their preferred ways by reading aloud text to them.
• Teachers make themselves available to students for support outside of their OCR class time.
• Teacher prints page of notes to provide student extra resource while completing activity.
Examples that support structure include:
• Teacher conducts individual check-ins with students on their progress in the course.
• Teacher reminds students of behavioral expectations.
• Student is pulled to work one-to-one with the teacher, and the teacher scaffolds the directions and questions from the assignment.
• Teacher responds quickly to student requests for help.
• Teacher circulates the room to make themselves available for student questions.
• Teacher helps students schedule their activities that block.
• Teachers posted a visual schedule for the block on the whiteboard/wall.
• Teachers check on student progress using screen-monitoring technology and provide feedback.
• Teacher schedules student breaks into their tasks for the day.
Examples of autonomy-thwarting behaviors include:
• Using deadlines/consequences to pressure students to remain on-task.
• Students who finish their assigned work are left with nothing to work on.
• Threatening removal from OCR to pressure students into improving their attendance and progress in the course.
• Teachers deliver instruction in ways that exclude some students.
Examples of behaviors that thwart structure include:
• Students are expected to be working/making progress towards their goals, but specific tasks remain unstructured.
• Students are pulled to work independently during the school day and left largely alone in an unstructured environment.
• Few to no interactions between teacher and students after initial greetings.
• Teachers engaged in activities that are not related to OCR, leave their students to work without any structure.
This study explores how teachers tasked with supporting students engaged in a virtual learning platform for OCR provide autonomy support and structure, and how this influences student engagement in these online settings. Few studies have yet to explore this relationship in an online setting. Additionally, this offers a much-needed qualitative exploration of SDT principles and practices, which are traditionally carried out with quantitative methods (Howard et al., 2024). In this way, this study helps fill multiple gaps in the credit recovery as well as Self-determination Theory literatures.
A principal aim of this study is to also help advance educational practices around student engagement in OCR settings. Our aim is to provide high school administrators and teachers of credit recovery with examples of best practices that promote student engagement in these classrooms. Doing so will help educators make data-driven decisions about how to best facilitate these spaces in ways that nurture students’ motivation, according to principles and perspectives from educational psychology.
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