The Effect of Need-Supportive Environment on Basic Psychological Needs, Motivational Orientation, Well-being and Motor Learning in Students with Educable Intellectual Disability

this study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of motor learning in students with educable intellectual disability. The study method was quasi-experimental, and its design was pretest-posttest with a control group. The statistical population of the present study was made up of educable intellectual disability students of Marivan city. In this study, the entire available population, whose number was 77 people (40 girls and 37 boys, average age 13.01 ± 1.50 years), were included in the study and randomly divided into two experimental groups (need-supportive teaching group and common teaching group) and a control group. experimental groups practiced dart throwing for 8 sessions and each session consisted of 4 blocks of 10 attempts. To collect data, questionnaires of basic psychological needs (Chen et al., 2015), motivational orientation (Ryan & Connell, 1989), well-being (Diener & Emmons, 1984) and the performance of a standard task including 20 darts throw were used. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and analysis of variance with repeated measures at a significance level of 0.05. The results showed that need-supportive environment has reduced autonomy frustration and increased relatedness satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, and dart throwing performance in retention and transfer phases (P<0.01). But, no significant difference was observed between the groups in the components of well-being (P>0.05). According to the results obtained from this study, it seems that teachers' need-supportive teaching behaviors in physical education classes, compared to common teaching, have positive practical consequences for students with intellectual disabilities.