A Self-Determination Theory Survey Protocol for University Teachers' Professional Development Motivation, Teaching Self-Efficacy, and Engagement.

Abstract

University teachers participate in professional development under different institutional, disciplinary, and motivational conditions. Participation records alone cannot explain whether professional development translates into meaningful professional learning. This article presents a reproducible, anonymous, cross-sectional survey protocol for assessing psychological need satisfaction, autonomous and controlled motivation, teaching self-efficacy, professional development engagement, and reflective practice from a self-determination theory perspective. The protocol specifies eligibility screening, stratified convenience sampling, questionnaire construction, expert review, pilot testing, online administration, anonymization, response-quality screening, scale scoring, reliability estimation, correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, and sensitivity analyses. It also clarifies scale adaptation, permission verification, construct scoring, and the interpretation of highly reliable scales as potential indicators of item redundancy. Representative results were obtained from one completed implementation of the protocol, in which 326 submitted records were exported and 313 valid responses were retained after prespecified screening. The results showed that autonomy, competence, and relatedness need satisfaction were positively associated with autonomous motivation, and that autonomous motivation and teaching self-efficacy were associated with professional development engagement. The protocol is suitable for standardized, multi-institutional, survey-based studies of the motivational and professional belief correlates of professional development engagement. It is less suitable for causal inference, longitudinal change estimation, direct behavioral outcomes, or institution-level program evaluation unless repeated measurements, observation, qualitative inquiry, or administrative data are added.