Empowering College Students to Satisfy Their Basic Needs: Implications for Primary, Secondary, and Post-secondary Educators.

This study investigated the extent to which exposure to choice theory increased provisionally admitted freshmen college students' perceived satisfaction of their five basic needs of belonging, power, freedom, fun, and survival; their composite need satisfaction (all five needs summed); their self-esteem; and their inner locus of control. A quasiexperimental, nonrandomized pretest/posttest design was used. For five weeks, the treatment group received exposure to choice theory principles. The results suggested that teaching college freshmen to evaluate and better meet their basic needs had a positive sustaining effect on their perception of satisfaction of the belonging need, their composite need satisfaction, and their self-esteem. This study could prove beneficial to postsecondary educators, particularly those invested in the academic success and retention of provisionally admitted freshmen students. Teaching students to identify and take action on their levels of need satisfaction may help them increase their academic motivation, facilitate their adjustment to college, promote academic success, increase retention rates, and decrease ineffective behaviors. This article concludes with a list of recommendations for elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educators on how to maximize the satisfaction of students' needs based on the vast number of empirical studies on self-determination theory (SDT), which the authors argue is conceptually very closely aligned with choice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]