A review of observational instruments to assess the motivational environment in sport and physical education settings

To date, the majority of research grounded in achievement goal frameworks (AGT) and self-determination theory (SDT), which has examined the coach-created motivational environment and its correlates, has relied exclusively on athletes’ self-reported perceptions. This limits progress in the field as objective data on real-life events could be used to further identify what coaches and teachers do and say to ‘motivate’ their athletes and students to influence their skill development, performance and well-being. Such information may help inform how coaches and teachers should be trained to create more motivationally adaptive environments and could help extend results derived from selfreport measures. This review outlines the observational systems that are currently available and the research related to AGT and/or SDT-based objective assessments of motivational dimensions of the coaching and physical education (PE) environment. Future research could utilise information in this review to employ and/or amend one of the available observation systems to address important questions related to the observed motivational environment in sport and PE.