Learning and Individual Diferences 97 (2022) 102161 1041-6080/© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Need-supportive teaching is associated with reading achievement via intrinsic motivation across eight cultures Joseph Y. Haw a, c, * , Ronnel B. King b a Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region b Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region c School of Education, Ateneo de Zamboanga University, La Purisima Street, 7000 Zamboanga City, Philippines A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Self-determination theory Need-supportive teaching Reading achievement Intrinsic motivation Cross-cultural ABSTRACT Self-determination theory (SDT) posits that need-supportive teaching, which includes support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness facilitates motivation and achievement across cultures. However, prior evidence of SDT's cross-cultural generalizability were drawn from a limited set of cultural contexts. Furthermore, prior work has mainly focused on autonomy-support. This study used data from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (N = 578,168). Countries were grouped following Schwartz’ (2009) eight cultural clusters. Results found that need-supportive teaching predicted achievement via intrinsic motivation across the eight cultural groups. However, the magnitude of the associations among the variables varied across cultures. Findings also indicated a positive association between need-supportive teaching and achievement in six out of the eight cultural groups. However, a different pattern was observed in East-Central Europe (non-signifcant association) and Africa and the Middle East (negative association). This study offers broad, though not unanimous, support for SDT's cultural generalizability. 1. Introduction For more than three decades, hundreds of studies on self- determination theory (SDT: Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000, 2020) have been published that yielded important insights into student motivation, learning, and well-being (Howard et al., 2021; Stroet et al., 2013; Yu et al., 2018). A key fnding of these studies is the positive in- fuence of need-supportive teaching on students' academic achievement by facilitating intrinsic motivation. When teachers and contexts support students' basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, stu- dents fourish. SDT asserts that the association of need-supportive teaching with students' positive learning outcomes is cross-culturally generalizable (Reeve et al., 2018; Ryan & Deci, 2000). There is exten- sive empirical evidence that need-supportive teaching promotes student motivation and various positive learning outcomes across different socio-cultural contexts (e.g., Chen et al., 2015; Reeve et al., 2018; Ryan & Deci, 2020; Stroet et al., 2013). However, many SDT cross-cultural studies only examined SDT tenets in a single non-Western country (e.g., Jang et al., 2012; Zhou et al., 2019) or compared groups of countries in terms of Western and Eastern cultures (e.g., Chirkov et al., 2003; Jiang et al., 2021; Nalipay et al., 2020). However, these studies usually operationalized culture in terms of country of origin or ethnicity which might be a somewhat simplistic operationalization of culture (e.g., Cohen & Varnum, 2016; King et al., 2018; King & McInerney, 2014). Schwartz (2006) proposed a cultural grouping based on value orientation. As of this current writing, there has been no research that tested SDT's cross-cultural generalizability using this lens. Furthermore existing research has mainly focused on auton- omy support (e.g., Diseth & Samdal, 2014; Haerens et al., 2015; Kaplan, 2018; Patall et al., 2018). Relatively fewer studies have investigated teachers' support for other basic needs such as competence and relat- edness (Stroet et al., 2013). Hence, there is a need for studies that examine the three need-supportive practices altogether with a more fne-grained cross-cultural testing. The presence of large-scale international assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA) affords re- searchers the means to investigate SDT's generalizability across a broader group of countries from different sociocultural contexts (e.g., Jiang et al., 2021; Lee, 2014). The present study aimed to investigate the role of need-supportive teaching in students' motivation and * Corresponding author at: Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. E-mail address: joseph.haw.sj@gmail.com (J.Y. Haw). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Learning and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/lindif https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2022.102161 Received 21 May 2021; Received in revised form 4 May 2022; Accepted 15 May 2022