Current Research Projects
Education
Ongoing research projects
- The Physical Education teacher as a motivating coach: Developing an online evidence-based tool
- Effective professional support for novice physical education teachers.
- Personal and social goals in primary school physical education in The Netherlands.
- Teaching methodology: Stimulating (through cooperative learning) and measuring social skills within the secondary educational courses economics and physical education.
- Essays on choice-based assessment in economics education
Realized research projects
- ‘Help, my teacher and parents are pressuring me!’ Antecedents and consequences of children and adolescents’ coping responses to controlling behavior. (2022)
- Motivating assessment in physical education: The effects of goal clarification and process feedback on students’ motivation. (2021)
- Primary prevention of sports-related injuries in and through physical education teachers: feasibility, effectiveness and transferability tot he adolescents. (2016)
- Attending to the dark side of teachers’ motivating style: Controlling teaching in relation to student motivation in physical education. (2016)
- Antecedents of motivating and demotivating teaching behavior and burnout in physical education teachers. (2014)
- Optimal motivation in physical education: identifying and manipulating need-supportive teaching behavior. (2014)
Sport
Ongoing research projects
- Motivating and demotivating parenting and coaching in youth sports
- Bidirectional influences in coach-athlete relationships and team dynamics
- Moral Identity of Athletes and Staff
- Pushing the limit or crossing boundaries? Defining the gray zone in sport and developing interventions to prevent athlete harassment and abuse in sport.
- Innovation mandate (Vlaio): Developing innovative, effective tools to strengthen motivating leadership in sports clubs
Realized research projects
- Everybody is a winner: overestimation of one’s competence as a predictor of dropout from sports? (2022)
- Organizational effectiveness in sports clubs: identifying and strengthening quintessential management processes and motivating styles board members rely on. (2021)
- Motivating children and adolescents to develop a physically active lifestyle: the role of extracurricular school-based sports and motor competence. (2017)
Health
Current research projects
- Can optimizing competence development lead to more effective and continuous workplace learning in healthcare education?
- Understanding and optimizing the (de)motivating interaction styles of healthcare providers in supporting patients' self-management.
The Physical Education teacher as a motivating coach: Developing an online evidence-based tool
Background: Physical Education (PE) teachers who adopt a motivating style fuel students’ autonomous motivation, stimulating students to be physically active
Goal: To develop and evaluate an online evidence-based learning tool (https://vobserver.sportamundi.com/) to help improve teachers’ motivating style. In the tool, teachers reflect on their personalized profile of teaching styles and video-annotate video-recording of their classes.
Contact: Arne Bouten focuses primarily on the effects on teacher outcomes (e.g., motivating teaching style and intrinsic versus extrinsic instructional goals), Nele Van Doren focuses on the effect on student outcomes (e.g., motivation and physical activity).
Effective professional support for novice physical education teachers
Background: Beginning teachers experience various challenges such as problems with classroom management, dealing with rebellious behavior of the students, stress, and workload. A high percentage of beginning secondary physical education (PE) teachers quit teaching within the first five years.
Goal: Exploring how to optimize the initial guidance and general well-being of beginning PE teachers
- Examine the specific needs of beginning PE teachers.
- Compare beginning and more experienced PE teachers in terms of (de)motivating teaching styles and their antecedents.
- Develop and evaluate a guidance program for beginning PE teachers.
Contact: Silke Hellebaut
Personal and social goals in primary school physical education in The Netherlands
Background: In the Netherlands, the main objective of physical education (PE) in primary school is to help children get acquainted with the movement culture so that they will remain intrinsically motivated to participate in sports now and later on in life. To do so, the subject of PE is shaped by two categories:
- Children should learn the basic forms of movement (also referred to as fundamental movement skills) and games in order to participate in the movement culture in a safe and liable way.
- Children should learn based on 9 sub goals how to cooperate in a respectful way, how to arrange their learning process and how to assess and consider their individual possibilities (referred to as personal and social goals).
Goal: Exploring the ways in which PE teachers can guide children effectively in their personal and social development be identified.
- Provide an overview of the existing literature on school-aged children’s and youth’s (i.e. 6- to 18-year-olds) personal and social development within the context of physical education and sports.
- Investigate how expert PE teachers perceive, interpret and implement personal and social goals in their current practice
- Develop and evaluate a professional development initiative aimed at supporting novice and experienced PE teachers to include personal and social goals more efficiently in their lessons
Contact: Katrijn Opstoel
Teaching methodology: Stimulating (through cooperative learning) and measuring social skills within the secondary educational courses economics and physical education
Background: The focus in the workplace is no longer merely placed on hard (i.e., cognitive, job-specific, economic and financial) skills, but also increasingly on soft social skills. This shift has created a skills gap where employers pointing out the importance of teamwork, communication, leadership, and critical thinking skills.
Goal: Examining how the social skills competences can be achieved and supported through collaborative learning?
- Develop an evidence-based curriculum for the (Business) economics course, based on the teaching method of collaborative learning, that allows teachers to stimulate both students’ hard, cognitive, economic skills, and their soft, social skills.
- Develop course-specific ((Business) Economics and Physical Education) evaluation methods for evaluating students’ social skills in secondary education.
- Develop a valid and reliable measuring instrument to measure social skills across disciplines.
- Investigate, both within (Business) Economics and Physical Education, the effects of collaborative learning on the stimulation of course-specific and social skills.
Contact: Amelie Vanhove
Essays on choice-based assessment in economics education
Background: Many students experience a certain amount of stress before tests and exams. However, for some students the pressure to perform well and the stress of being tested can be so intense that they exhibit debilitating test anxiety. Test anxiety is a fundamental educational challenge as it is not only associated with lower well-being, but it is also a powerful barrier for student learning and performance.
Goal: Examine how secondary school students in economic education can be evaluated in a motivating way in order to reduce their test anxiety and increase their academic performance
- Examine whether and how teachers’ classroom communication and offering students a choice between (test) questions has an effect on students’ test anxiety.
- Examine the difference between de preparation phase and the test itself.
Contact: Stefanie De Jonge
‘Help, my teacher and parents are pressuring me!’ Antecedents and consequences of children and adolescents’ coping responses to controlling behavior (2021)
Research based on self-determination theory shows that a controlling style leads to frustration of the basic psychological needs, which in turn undermines adolescents’ well-being, motivation and engagement.
Goal: To get insight into the active role of adolescents in interacting with their parents and teachers.
- Investigate why adolescents react differently when confronted with a controlling parent or teacher. Herein, we examine the role of temperament and the extent to which the adolescent is raised in an autonomy-supportive environment.
- Investigate whether coping plays a moderating role in the relationship between a controlling style and adaptive functioning in adolescents. In particular, we aim to explore whether the effects of a controlling style on maladaptive functioning decrease when an adaptive coping strategy is used or, on the contrary, is magnified when adolescents rely on a maladaptive coping strategy.
Contact: Nele Flamant
Motivating assessment in physical education: The effects of goal clarification and process feedback on students’ motivation (2020)
- Performance grading in Physical Education (PE) often negatively affects students’ feelings of competence and interest and love of learning (i.e., autonomous motivation; Ryan & Weinstein, 2009).
- Goal clarification and process feedback are known as two key teaching strategies of ‘Assessment for Learning (AfL; provides students with insight into their learning process so they can build towards higher standards; Wiliam, 2011).
Goal: Investigate the effects of different forms and quality aspects of assessment on students’ perceived need satisfaction and frustration, quality of motivation and fear during different types of assessment in PE.
- Gain more insight in students’ perceived need satisfaction and frustration, quality of motivation and fear during different types of assessment.
- (Experimentally) test, based on the gained insights, the impact of goal clarification and process feedback on students’ need-based experiences.
The PhD is available through following link.
Contact: Christina Krijgsman
Primary prevention of sports-related injuries in and through physical education teachers: feasibility, effectiveness and transferability tot he adolescents (2016)
The PhD is available through following link.
Attending to the dark side of teachers’ motivating style: Controlling teaching in relation to student motivation in physical education (2016)
The PhD is available through following link.
Antecedents of motivating and demotivating teaching behavior and burnout in physical education teachers (2014)
The PhD is available through following link.
Optimal motivation in physical education: identifying and manipulating need-supportive teaching behavior (2014)
This PhD is available through following link.
Motivating and demotivating parenting and coaching in youth sports
Both parents and coaches play an important role in the sport experience of youth athletes.
Goals:
- Which (combinations of) (de)motivating behaviors of coaches and parents are associated with the youth athletes’ well-being, motivation, and performance?
- What motivates sports coaches to adopt a motivating or just a demotivating coaching style?
Contact: Sofie Morbée
Bidirectional influences in coach-athlete relationships and team dynamics
Goals:
- Identifying the bidirectional influences between coaches and athletes in individual and team sports for motivational and emotional experiences.
- Adapting dyadic statistical models and techniques to sports context and applying them to gain a deeper understanding of dynamics in coach-athlete relationships and teams.
Contact: Marieke Fonteyn
Moral Identity of Athletes and Staff
Background: Corruption and fraud represent major threats to sport itself and to those involved.
Goals: Explore if moral identity is a protective buffer against the enactment of fraudulent behavior.
- Studying Moral Identity through a combination of surveys and field experiments.
- Developing and evaluating a prototype of a Moral Education Workshop for athletes to inform about the necessity of preventing fraud and to train how to recognize and react on fraudulent behavior.
Contact: Tassilo Tissot
Pushing the limit or crossing boundaries? Defining the gray zone in sport and developing interventions to prevent athlete harassment and abuse in sport
Background: Athlete harassment and abuse towards children and youth is reaching epidemic proportions. Given its far-reaching negative consequences, it is considered a major worldwide public health problem. Sport is not immune to this issue.
Goal: Gain insight into how athlete, coach, sports professionals or the entourage of the athlete can push physical and psychological limits of the athlete in a healthy way without crossing boundaries
- Create a common language among sport professionals about athlete harassment and abuse by developing an evidence-based, age-specific taxonomy related to ‘gray zone behaviors’.
- Investigate athlete harassment and abuse in its broader picture by mapping different important actors (e.g., coach and entourage) and investigate risk and protective factors.
- Conduct a series of (micro-)intervention studies to examine whether the normalization of athlete harassment and abuse can be tackled at organizational level.
Contact: Elisa Lefever mainly focusses on the effects of the different coaching styles, Felien Laureys will try to clarify the grey zone behaviors.
Innovation mandate (Vlaio): Developing innovative, effective tools to strengthen motivating leadership in sports clubs
Background: Board members of sports clubs (mostly volunteers) are challenged to keep the club financially healthy, retain members, and attract volunteers. This requires a strong motivating leadership style.
Purpose of the innovation mandate:
- Developing a scan to measure the motivating leadership style in sports clubs. The scan identifies the motivating style board members rely on in their interaction with stakeholders as well as the motivating style used within the board.
- Developing simulation training programs that effectively strengthen the motivating leadership style in sports clubs.
- Testing the effectiveness of the scan and simulation training programs on the motivating leadership style and stakeholder motivation.
To this end, we are collaborating with the Flemish Sports Federation
Contact: Tom De Clerck
Everybody is a winner: overestimation of one’s competence as a predictor of dropout from sports? (2022)
The increasing number of young people and children who are physically inactive is discouraging as physical inactivity is one of the major health risks associated with obesity and chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
Goal:Gain a better understanding of the underlying factors that cause dropout from sports.
- Investigate the role of overestimation of one’s personal motor competence in the prediction of persistence in, versus dropout from sports.
- Investigate the psychological and contextual precursors of this overestimation.
Organizational effectiveness in sports clubs: identifying and strengthening quintessential management processes and motivating styles board members rely on (2021)
Many sports clubs have problems that threaten their existence such as declining finances and a decreasing number of coaches, volunteers, members. These problems are partly due to environmental changes such as decreasing governmental subsidies, demographic change, and competition from commercial sport providers.
However, board members of sports clubs can also implement effective management processes to address these issues.
Purpose of Clubgrade:
- Identifying effective management processes board members can rely on.
- Developing and evaluating an intervention to strengthen effective management processes.
- Investigating the effect of this intervention on the sport club's management, the behaviors and attitudes of important internal stakeholders such as coaches, volunteers and members, and the human and financial resources.
More information
Contact: Tom De Clerck
Motivating children and adolescents to develop a physically active lifestyle: the role of extracurricular school-based sports and motor competence (2017)
This PhD is available through following link
Can optimizing competence development lead to more effective and continuous workplace learning in healthcare education?
- To optimally develop the competences of healthcare professionals, continuity both within the educational program and after graduation is needed. On top of that there is a poor agreement between different educational programs hindering interprofessional collaboration. To overcome these problems, the involvement of all important stakeholders is indispensable but often lacking in the development of healthcare educational programs.
- Examining if tools such as ePortfolio, competence frameworks, or feedback-supporting tool can optimize the competence development of undergraduate healthcare education, during the program but also after graduation.
- Focus on interprofessional communication as this ensures better patient care.
- Develop an indicator list to observe and assess interprofessional communication in healthcare.
Contact: Oona Janssens
Understanding and optimizing the (de)motivating interaction styles of healthcare providers in supporting patients' self-management
Background: Through their (de)motivating interaction styles, healthcare providers play an important role in encouraging patients' self-management (i.e., active involvement in their personal care pathway).
Goals:
- Identify (de)motivating interaction styles of health professionals (in training) and the antecedents of these interaction styles .
- Develop and evaluate an intervention to improve health professionals (in training) their interaction styles.
Contact: Laura Hesters