Agency as a fourth aspect of students’ engagement during learning activities

Abstract

While a consensus has emerged to characterize student engagement during learning activities as a three-component construct featuring behavioral, emotional, and cognitive aspects, we propose adding agentic engagement as an important new aspect, which we define as students’ constructive contribution into the flow of the instruction they receive. High school students (237 females, 128 males) from Taiwan completed surveys of their classroom motivation and the four hypothesized aspects of engagement while grades were obtained at the end of the semester. Structural equation modeling analyses showed that agentic engagement was both a distinct and an important construct, one that was associated with students’ constructive motivation, related to each of the other three aspects of engagement, and predicted independent variance in achievement. The discussion highlights the important, though currently neglected, ways that students contribute constructively into the flow of the instruction they receive, as by personalizing it and by enhancing both the lesson and the conditions under which they learn.

Introduction

Student engagement during learning activities is an important and heavily researched educational construct (Christenson et al., 2011, Fredricks et al., 2004, Jimerson et al., 2003; National Research National Research Council, 2004, Skinner et al., 2009a). It is an important educational outcome in its own right as a marker of students’ positive functioning, but it is further important because it predicts highly valued outcomes, such as students’ academic progress and achievement (Ladd and Dinella, 2009, Skinner et al., 1998). Student engagement is also a well-understood construct, as a general consensus has emerged to characterize it as a 3-component construct featuring behavioral (on-task attention, effort, persistence, lack of conduct problems), emotional (presence of interest and enthusiasm, absence of anger, anxiety, and boredom), and cognitive (use of strategic and sophisticated learning strategies, active self-regulation) aspects (e.g., see Fredricks et al., 2004, Jimerson et al., 2003; National Research Council, 2004). Proximal influences on student engagement are also well understood. For instance, student engagement rises and falls in response to lessons that are challenging vs. too easy (Davidson, 1999, Turner et al., 1998) and to varying levels of a teacher’s expression of warmth, provision of structure, and support for autonomy (Birch and Ladd, 1997, Murray and Greenberg, 2000, Reeve et al., 2004, Skinner and Belmont, 1993, Skinner et al., 2008, Wentzel, 1997), just as it is responsive to students’ own motivational states, such as autonomy, competence, relatedness, and perceived control (Connell and Wellborn, 1991, Furrer and Skinner, 2003, Gottfried, 1990, Miserandino, 1996, Skinner et al., 1998, Skinner et al., 2008).

Recognizing that engagement is responsive to proximal conditions, researchers generally emphasize the directional flow that teachers’ high-quality relationships and instructional supports have on students’ subsequent behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement during learning activities. That said, this same body of research also acknowledges that student engagement exerts a (bi-)directional effect on teachers’ subsequent motivating style and instructional behaviors (Pelletier et al., 2002, Pelletier and Vallerand, 1996, Skinner and Belmont, 1993). For instance, when students episodically display boredom, dispersed attention, and little effort, then teachers tend to change how they relate to those students (consciously or unconsciously) by lessening their support and heightening their control (Pelletier et al., 2002).

The reciprocal influence that student engagement has on teachers’ interpersonal style is presumed to flow through teachers’ awareness of, observations of, and reactions to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. While this is almost certainly true, it is also an incomplete understanding of these dynamic student–teacher interactions. In large, diverse, fluid, and multi-activity classrooms in which teachers are engrossed in instruction, teachers necessarily miss (are unable to monitor) a good deal of students’ displays of engagement vs. disengagement. What is missing from an understanding of how students intentionally contribute into the instruction they receive is a direct (rather than inferential) path. To better understand this process of how students contribute constructively into the flow of instruction they receive, as by personalizing it and by enhancing both the lesson and the conditions under which they learn, we propose the concept of agentic engagement.