Supporting students’ agency in the science classroom: Methods and insights

Students do their best work when they have a sense of agency around science and science learning. This agency is visible when students help make decisions in the science classroom about what is important to pay attention to, what counts as “good” vs. “bad,” or why knowledge might be meaningful. Yet, it’s still difficult to know how to best support students as agents, especially in school settings. The goal of this study was to improve understanding of how to best support students’ agency, as well as how to best measure our progress toward that goal. The first part took place in a 5th grade classroom where students had lots of opportunities to make decisions about the criteria that should be used. Findings showed that students had sophisticated and diverse ideas about “what should count,” and often negotiated with their teacher for influence over the criteria. Knowing more about students’ use of criteria helps researchers understand how students can play an active role in scientific critique, even without being professional scientists themselves. The second part of this study worked to improve a teacher questionnaire that measures support for student agency. Based on the findings, a statistical model was built to make sure that teachers’ scores were comparable across time and that the same “measuring stick” was used at each occasion. Together, these findings highlight the ways that attention to students’ and teachers’ agency (and how we measure them) can go beyond superficial choices and extend to sophisticated decision-making, meaning-making, and learning.