Teaching & Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Focus on Student Agency
Research and Best Practices: One in a Series on 21st Century Skills
My colleagues and I have written about promising instructional and assessment practices to cultivate 21st century competencies in K-12 schools. In this blog, I’ll summarize what we’ve learned about one of those skills, student agency, and highlight implications for practice.
Defining Student Agency
Student agency is the ability to exercise control over one’s own thought processes, motivation and action. Psychologist Albert Bandura identified four interconnected components essential for human agency:
- Intentionality: Setting goals and planning purposeful actions.
- Forethought: Anticipating future events and adjusting accordingly.
- Self-regulation: Managing emotions and behaviors to achieve goals.
- Self-reflectiveness: Evaluating one’s actions and effectiveness.
These components are contextually influenced by social and cultural factors. Effective decision-making emerges from the interaction between individual behavior and environmental conditions.
For a deeper dive into what we’ve learned about student agency, see our literature review in the Center for Assessment’s toolkit, Assessing 21st Century Skills.
How Student Agency Relates to Other 21st Century Skills
Concepts such as autonomy, self-regulation, self-efficacy, motivation and self-directed learning overlap with agency but remain distinct.
Autonomy emphasizes independence in learning, focusing on personal freedom to act, whereas agency highlights interdependence, involving the dynamic interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors.
Self-regulation, a core component of agency, involves managing thoughts, emotions and focus to support goal-directed actions. While self-regulation refers to internal processes, agency encompasses the broader ability to act intentionally and adaptively toward goals. Metaphorically speaking, if agency is a race car’s performance, self-regulation is the engine ensuring smooth operation.
Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to succeed. Self-efficacy motivates agency by fostering confidence and persistence through challenges. Similarly, motivation drives agency by initiating and sustaining purposeful action.
Self-directed learning reflects the practical steps of taking ownership of learning, while agency represents the underlying capacity enabling this process. Evidence of agency is therefore demonstrated through the self-directed learning process.
Instruction for Student Agency
Research on the effects of school-based interventions to promote agency is limited. That said, preliminary research suggests that certain interventions may hold promise for influencing student agency. Specific strategies vary by grade level and include approaches like problem- and project-based learning (PBL), social-emotional learning (SEL) and self-regulation interventions.
In early childhood and primary grades, self-regulation development can be supported through teacher-led conversations, interactive games, and role-playing activities. Family-based programs have also been found to improve self-regulation. Examples of family-based programs include group meetings among teachers, parents and their child; skill-building activities with parents and children, mentoring programs and individual parent consultations.
Mastery learning is a structured instructional approach used across the K-12 grade span to ensure students achieve a thorough understanding of foundational academic concepts before moving on to more complex topics. Unlike traditional instruction, where teaching progresses at a set pace regardless of student comprehension, mastery learning breaks subject matter into smaller modules with clearly defined objectives and outcomes. Students advance only after demonstrating proficiency on modular assessments.
This approach typically incorporates three major components: (1) explicit learning goals tailored to individual student needs, (2) responsive instruction that allows practice and remediation opportunities, and (3) assessments that offer timely feedback to address learning gaps and misconceptions, ensuring all students have the foundation necessary for deeper learning.
Strategies to improve students’ self-efficacy have also been shown to support agency. For example, within a mastery learning approach, a student who struggles with basic math facts could be given a timed quiz at the start of each math session. The positive reinforcement that results from higher accuracy and faster times has been shown to influence higher self-efficacy.
Other research-based strategies include direct observation (e.g., watching a teacher or peer deliver an effective speech), teacher encouragement and positive self-talk (e.g., “Ted Lasso” fans might remember Colin’s mantra, “I am a strong and capable man.”). When applied in the appropriate contexts to address key underlying causes of low self-efficacy, these strategies have been shown to improve self-efficacy.
Assessment Design and Use for Student Agency
Educators seeking to assess student agency should consider the following principles:
Develop (or adopt) a clear, research-based construct definition. Establishing a shared, research-based understanding of agency helps ensure assessments effectively measure the intended construct.
Account for content and context. Claims about a student’s agency should be tied to specific learning contexts. Therefore, it is critical for assessment designers to clearly define the specific claims an assessment aims to support and the contexts in which agency is being demonstrated.
For example, a student may demonstrate strong agency by independently designing and leading a civics-based community service project in their local neighborhood. However, this does not automatically mean they can exhibit the same level of agency when navigating a complex research project in a science lab. Therefore, assessments of agency must account for the specific context—civics-based leadership versus the scientific process—when making claims about a student’s capabilities.
Use multiple assessments to cultivate and evaluate student agency. Self-report surveys and self-reflective exercises provide indirect evidence of students’ skills, dispositions, and beliefs. To fully capture a student’s competency in skills associated with student agency, however, simulated or authentic performance tasks are required, such as self-directed learning activities, which permit direct observation and yield pertinent evidence. This latter implication is discussed in more depth below.
Incorporate performance assessments and portfolios into classroom practices. While research evidence on student agency is still emerging, incorporating authentic assessment approaches—such as performance assessments and portfolios—can play a pivotal role in its development.
With performance assessments and portfolios (especially e-portfolios) embedded into classroom activities, students have opportunities to demonstrate their ability to act intentionally, thoughtfully and independently in real-world contexts. This, in turn, provides educators with authentic evidence of their students’ sense of agency. Portfolios have been linked to greater self-efficacy and achievement, particularly when used for instructional purposes to capture students’ learning achievements and encourage critical reflection and improvement.
Provide frequent opportunities for students to practice and demonstrate student agency. Formative assessment practices are important because they offer timely feedback, allowing students to reflect on their performance, identify areas for improvement and refine their approaches to learning. Educators can use such strategies as peer feedback, self-assessment and structured reflection to support the skills, attitudes and dispositions that student agency requires. By investing in formative assessment, educators foster environments in which students can develop their agency through ongoing and targeted practice and reflection.
Use assessment to improve environmental conditions that support student agency. Environmental factors play a major role in facilitating student agency. Assessment can play a critical role in understanding and improving school-based conditions that encourage students to exercise agency. For example, many schools annually implement school climate surveys. These surveys capture the extent to which students feel safe, supported, and cared for in school, among other things. School personnel can use survey reports to monitor these and other important conditions that influence student agency.
Concluding Thoughts
Developing robust approaches for teaching and assessing student agency is essential to help students thrive in today’s world. Through our work with our partners at the International Baccalaureate, we now know more about how to define, teach and assess student agency and other skills.
Our research on student agency was supported by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme. The author would like to acknowledge the thought partnership of colleagues who contributed to this work, including Tim Gallagher, Jen Merriman and Magda Balica from IB, and Carla Evans at the Center for Assessment. Any errors and omissions are my own.