Promoting an Agentic Engagement Orientation: Results of an Intervention in Introductory College STEM Courses

• In Event: Agentic Engagement: A New, Important, and Progress-Enabling Educational Construct

Abstract

Purpose
Agentic engagement describes students’ proactive attempts to influence instruction so that it better supports their motivation and learning. Students who agentically engage use a variety of behaviors (e.g., expressing preferences, asking questions) to make the circumstances for learning more interesting, valuable, or personally-relevant. The purpose of this study was to test the potential benefits of a newly conceptualized intervention promoting an agentic engagement orientation among college students in introductory physical science courses.

Theoretical Framework
Traditionally, scholars have conceptualized engagement as a multidimensional construct that is primarily a response to supportive teaching conditions. However, Reeve and colleagues (2011; 2013) recently proposed that agentic engagement represents a unique student-initiated form of engagement that has consequences for the classroom climate and student motivation.

Drawing on established mindset interventions (Yeager & Dweck, 2012), our objective was to explore the benefits of an intervention promoting a mindset and strategies for agentic engagement. We predicted that exposing students to a mindset emphasizing that motivation and the classroom environment are malleable and responsive to agentic engagement strategies would lead to greater agentic engagement mindset endorsement, as well as greater subsequent in-class engagement, autonomy and competence need satisfaction, interest, and other motivational outcomes, compared to students in alternative and control group conditions.

Methods and Materials
Seven-hundred and fourteen students (female: 56%; 37% Asian, 33% White, 12% Latinx, 4% Black) participated in the “Motivation Skills Study” in exchange for extra credit in their science class at a university. Students were nested within lab sections (N = 61) and randomly assignmed into one of three conditions at the lab-level, such that all participating students within a lab received the same condition.

Students in the agentic intervention condition engaged with a web-based intervention at the beginning and middle of the semester. They read evidence and quotes from peers endorsing the idea that students can change their motivation and the motivational-support they receive in class, and they engaged in short writing exercises endorsing these ideas. Students in the alternative intervention condition were exposed to parallel materials focused on study strategies. Students in an inactive control condition were not exposed to any intervention materials. We measured key psychological/motivational variables at the beginning and end of the semester.

Results
Regression-based, multilevel-mediation analyses indicated that students who received the agentic engagement intervention reported more malleable end-of-semester agentic mindset beliefs, compared to both the inactive control and the study skills intervention conditions. In turn, this mindset predicted greater in-class engagement, competence and autonomy need satisfaction, perceptions of instructor autonomy support, interest, autonomous motivation, and other desirable outcomes. Indirect effects were positive and statistically significant. These results are shown in Table 1.

Discussion
This experimental study extends prior correlational and longitudinal research suggesting that agentic engagement may have important benefits for the motivational classroom climate and students’ motivation. Moreover, this intervention supports the dialectical-transactional nature of students’ engagement in the classroom and situates the intervention between helping students develop new agency beliefs and facilitating change in the environment to better support student motivation.

Authors

• Jeanette Zambrano, University of Southern California

• Erika Alisha Patall, University of Southern California