- 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 - 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 - We define agentic engagement as students’ constructive contribution into the flow of the instruction they receive. What this new concept captures is the process in which students intentionally and somewhat proactively try to personalize and otherwise enrich both what is to be learned and the conditions and circumstances under which it is to be learned. - To quantify this aspect of student engagement, one pioneering group of researchers developed the Hit-Steer Observation System (Fiedler, 1975; Koenigs, Fiedler, & deCharms, 1977). This system assesses the frequency of students’ attempts to constructively influence the teacher (a ‘‘hit’’) as well as whether those influence attempts are successful or not in changing the teacher’s subsequent behavior (a ‘‘steer’’). - When trained raters use the Hit-Steer Observation System to score students’ classroom engagement, they find that students’ influence attempts (and the ratio of these attempts to all influence attempts that occur during instruction—students’ and teachers’) (a) correlate positively with students’ perception of an origin learning climate, (b) occur more frequently in the classrooms of autonomy-supportive rather than controlling teachers, and (c) correlate positively with students’ academic achievement - Current conceptualizations of student engagement that emphasize only students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive involvement fall short of capturing the extent to which students contribute agentically into the on-going flow of the instruction they receive. It is one thing to try hard, enjoy, and enact sophisticated learning strategies when exposed to a learning activity, while it is another to contribute constructively into modifying what is to be learned or how it is to be experienced and learned. - researchers are increasingly recognizing that each aspect of engagement is distinct in important ways. For instance, the behavioral dynamics of engagement are different from its emotional dynamics in several important ways - Agentic engagement correlated positively and significantly with the other three aspects of engagement - Agentic engagement also correlated positively and significantly with all three measures of psychological need satisfaction - Agentic engagement further correlated positively and significantly with achievement - That is, achievement correlated positively and significantly with perceived autonomy, perceived competence, and perceived relatedness - Results supported all three goals, as agentic engagement (1) covaried with students’ motivation, with other indices of engagement, and with achievement, (2) was conceptually and statistically distinct from the three other aspects of engagement, and (3) predicted student achievement even after taking out the variance in achievement that could otherwise be attributed to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. - One theoretical framework to conceptualize the mutual effects that teachers and students have on each other is the student teacher dialectical framework within self-determination theory (SDT; Reeve, Deci, & Ryan, 2004). In this framework, (a) a teacher’s motivating style (and classroom contextual factors more generally) affects students’ motivation, (b) changes in students’ underlying motivational states (e.g., interest, psychological need satisfaction, goals) are expressed through changes in students’ engagement, and (c) changes in engagement in turn feedback to affect on-going changes in the teacher’s motivating style toward the student. - It makes sense to put student agency at the center of the student–teacher dialectic because students’ agentic engagement can be conceptualized as the ideal complement to a teacher’s autonomy-supportive motivating style. That is, agentic engagement involves students expressing opinions, communicating interests, and asking questions, while autonomy support involves creating the classroom conditions in which students feel free to express opinions, pursue interests, and ask questions. - he most pressing issue for future research is to more adequately assess the agentic engagement construct. In the present study, we created a brief measure based on our observations of students’ actual classroom behavior that represented a student ‘‘hit’’ (an influence attempt) within the Hit-Steer Observation System (discussed in the Introduction). While adequate for the present purposes, it is conceivable that the agentic engagement construct is a richer one than we portrayed. - we identify here what we believe to be five essential characteristics of agentic engagement: (1) It is proactive (occurs before or during, rather than after, the learning activity); (2) it is intentional (deliberate and purposeful); (3) it tries to enrich the learning opportunity (by making it more personal, interesting, challenging, or valued); (4) it contributes constructive input into the planning or on-going flow of instruction so that the student has a say in the conditions under which he or she learns; and (5) it does not connote teacher incompetence or ineffectiveness. - While we recognize this sample limitation as both real and important, our decision to sample students from an Eastern nation was actually an intentional one, as the prototypical classroom script in Chinese schools is highly teacher-centered and somewhat antagonistic to students’ classroom agency | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Reeve, Johnmarshall, and Ching-Mei Tseng. "Agency as a fourth aspect of students’ engagement during learning activities." _Contemporary educational psychology_ 36, no. 4 (2011): 257-267. - [Link](https://bmri.korea.ac.kr/bbs/pdf/1680/Reeve_Tseng%282011%29_CEP.pdf) | | |