The relations between urban high school science students’ agentic mindset, agentic engagement, and perceived teacher autonomy support and control

Longitudinal reciprocal effects of agentic engagement and autonomy support: Between- and within-person perspectives.

“…The nature of this sample raises a question of generalizability. As to whether our findings might generalize beyond the PE subject matter, studies of agentic engagement have sampled students from multiple subject matters (Reeve & Tseng, 2011) as well from single subject matter courses, such as science (Patall et al, 2022), foreign language (Dincer et al, 2019), and PE (Reeve, 2013). When Matos and colleagues (2018) compared agentic engagement, perceived autonomy support, and the correlation between agentic engagement and perceived autonomy support for students taking science classes versus students taking humanities classes, they found no subject matter differences.…”

“…These teaching practices include autonomy-need-satisfying instructional behaviors such as taking the students’ perspective, offering choices, inviting students to pursue their personal interests, and providing explanatory rationales. Accordingly, such autonomy supportive teaching tends to longitudinally increase the students’ agentic engagement behavior (Matos et al, 2018; Patall et al, 2022; Reeve et al, 2020). Autonomy-supportive teaching is educationally important because it facilitates students’ engagement, learning, achievement, prosocial behavior, and well-being (Aelterman et al, 2016; Cheon et al, 2019; De Meyer et al, 2016).…”

“…Theoretically and empirically, the relationship between autonomy support and agentic engagement has been established (Bordbar, 2019, 2021; Jiang & Zhang, 2021; Matos et al, 2018; Michou et al, 2023; Patall et al, 2019, 2021, 2022; Reeve, 2013; Reeve et al, 2020, 2022). Previous research, however, has some limitations that need to be addressed to establish the causality between autonomy support and agentic engagement (prerequisites b and c).…”

“…Most research has thus far tested unidirectional paths independently (except Matos et al, 2018). These studies tested either the teacher-facilitating path or the student-facilitating path, through cross-sectional (Benlahcene et al, 2022; Bordbar, 2019, 2021; Jiang & Zhang, 2021), longitudinal (Michou et al, 2023; Patall et al, 2022; Reeve, 2013), experimental (Reeve et al, 2022), or intervention (Patall et al, 2019; Reeve et al, 2020) research strategies. Such an “either-or” approach precludes statistical tests of bidirectionality (i.e., reciprocal relations) between autonomy support and agentic engagement.…”

PD to promote a ‘Yes! And…’ mindset

“…The 2022-2023 State of Engagement report from educational software company Go Guardian and the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education echoes this sentiment. In a survey of more than 1,400 practitioners from across the U.S., researchers found that of the “most influential factors” in determining which methods teachers adopt to engage their students, professional development is the least relevant (Patall et al, 2022).…”