Basic Psychological Need Fulfillment by Gender in Team Environments

This Research Work in Progress seeks to assess to what extent students’ genders are correlated with how they experience the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) within engineering student project teams. In particular, it asks: are female students more likely to experience a deficit of any of these psychological needs compared to male students in the student project team environment? This work is grounded in self-determination theory, which suggests that motivation exists not just in the binary (motivated or not), but rather in a continuum from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation, the type most associated with positive learning outcomes, is supported for an individual when their particular environment meets their basic psychological needs. Basic psychological need fulfillment is the extent to which an individual experiences autonomy, competence, and relatedness to others in a particular context. A survey tool from the literature (Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale) was modified for this study to map students’ basic psychological needs “profile” within the team environment to their genders. This 21-item scale gives students an interval score between 1 and 7 for each subscale: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Data have been collected from 89 undergraduate students enrolled in a class involving a long-term group project component. To answer the research question, k-means clustering techniques and t-tests are used to explore the relationships between gender and motivation.