Supervisors: Alieke van dijk (in cooperation with Noortje Janssen @RadbouD University)
To prepare higher education students for lifelong learning, it is important to stimulate their self-directed learning. To achieve this, students must have the opportunity to practice self-directed learning, which is commonly fostered by offering them agency—that is, a sense of control over their own learning. However, this should not only apply to students’ learning activities but also to how their knowledge is assessed.
In most traditional summative assessments in higher education, such as multiple-choice exams, student agency is generally lacking. Consequently, several research studies have aimed to increase students’ agency in assessment by modifying test formats.
Initial findings from these studies suggest that agency can be promoted through various interventions that allow students to make decisions about their assessment, such as co-design (Smith et al., 2024) and self-assessment (Nieminen, 2020). However, a comprehensive overview of the interventions designed to promote student agency is still missing. Additionally, it remains unclear which elements of these interventions influence student agency, how they do so, and under what circumstances agency is affected.
Active student engagement in assessment has shown to positively affect students’ understanding of the tasks at hand and their criteria, intrinsic motivation, engagement and confidence (Smith et al., 2024). This phenomenon is often referred to as agency or agentic engagement.
Relying on self-determination theory, providing students with the opportunity to make decisions about their learning and how they are assessed will make sure that their core psychological needs of competence (i.e., ability to produce desired outcomes and experiencing mastery) and autonomy (i.e., feelings of agency) will be met (Reeve, 2009; Wang, Liu, Kee, & Chian, 2019). The feeling of being competent and experiencing autonomy are considered two of the three core psychological needs to determine one’s goal directed behavior (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the relationship between agency and involvement in assessment for higher education students. What interventions are known to positively affect students’ (perceived) agency?
METHOD
Recently, we have taken the first steps in setting up a systematic review study to investigate interventions that aim to improve students’ agency. As part of this internship, you will continue with the next steps of this systematic review. Concretely, you will participate in the following activities – leading to an advice report on your findings and proposed next steps:
- Building upon and creating search terms that allow to investigate the effect of students’ involvement in assessment (i.e., interventions) and agency (e.g., agency, agentic engagement, autonomy, sense of control, power);
- Using different search engines to find out how many articles meet the criteria, starting with Web of Science;
- Determining the critical question and relevance of the systematic review based on the number of articles found
References
Alexander, P.A. (2020). Methodological guidance paper: The art and science of quality systematic reviews. Review of Educational Research, 90, 6-23. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654319854352
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.
Reeve, J. (2009). Why teachers adopt a controlling motivating style toward students and how they become more autonomy supportive. Educational Psychologist, 44, 159-178.
Smith, A., McConnell, L., Iyer, P., Allman-Farinelli, M., & Chen, J. (2024). Co-designing assessment tasks with students in tertiary education: A scoping review of the literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2376648
Wang, C. K. J., Liu, W. C., Kee, Y. H., & Chian, L. K. (2019). Competence, autonomy, and relatedness in the classroom: Understanding students’ motivational processes using the self-determination theory. Heliyon, 5, e01983.