Teacher interpersonal behaviors and student engagement in single-gender physical education: the mediating role of achievement emotions and the moderating effect of class gender composition

Adolescent physical inactivity remains a prominent global public health challenge, and school physical education (PE) is the core setting to foster adolescents' regular physical activity. While single-gender grouping is widely adopted in secondary PE worldwide, the mechanisms linking teacher interpersonal behaviors to student class engagement in this context remain underexplored. Grounded in the integrated framework of Self-Determination Theory and Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions, this study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine the effects of teachers' need-supportive and need-thwarting behaviors on student PE engagement, with achievement emotions as the mediator and class gender composition as the moderator. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 332 Grade 11 Chinese high school students, with data analyzed via SPSS, Process macro, and AMOS. Key results are presented as follows: (1). Teachers' need-supportive behaviors positively predicted student engagement and positive achievement emotions, while need-thwarting behaviors negatively predicted engagement and positively predicted negative achievement emotions. (2). Positive achievement emotions exerted a fully mediating effect, and negative achievement emotions played a partially mediating effect in the associations between teacher interpersonal behaviors and student PE class engagement. (3). Class gender composition significantly moderated the direct predictive path from need-supportive behaviors to engagement, with a stronger positive effect observed in all-female single-gender PE classes. (4). The emotional mediating mechanism between teacher behaviors and student engagement remained invariant across all-male and all-female single-gender class groups. This study enriches theoretical research on single-gender PE and provides evidence-based pedagogical implications for optimizing single-gender PE teaching practices.