Micro-Agency: Measuring the Initiation of Agency Within Science Classes Article

Hazari, Z, Farhangi, S, Potvin, G. (2019). Micro-Agency: Measuring the Initiation of Agency Within Science Classes . 49(1), 64-69. 10.2505/4/jcst19_049_01_64

cited authors

  • Hazari, Z; Farhangi, S; Potvin, G

abstract

  • Given the growth of active learning, it is important to understand how students begin to experience agency within and beyond the classroom. Agency in this context refers to students taking intentional self-driven actions that are not necessarily prescribed. We propose and examine a measure that can identify students’micro-agency (initiation of agential actions), which can be used to assess how students progress through a course toward a more robust agential position in learning science. The construct for micro-agency compares students’ micro-agential acts in science with their own normative acts in other academic domains. The items include five micro-agential actions that students can take within the context of a typical science class as well as in their other classes. Data was collected for these items in introductory physics (n = 60), chemistry (n = 156), and biology (n = 77) courses to assess the validity and reliability of the construct, which in all cases was strongly supported. We propose that using this measure can be an easy indicator of students’ development of micro-agency for educators and can be used by researchers to study practices that begin to promote agency among students.

publication date

  • January 1, 2019

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

start page

  • 64

end page

  • 69

volume

  • 49

issue

  • 1