Assessing agency of university students: validation of the AUS Scale

Abstract

Fostering agency as a core component of professionalism is seen as a critical task of higher education. However, the tools for assessing university students' agency, and the pedagogical and relational resources needed for its development, are lacking. The present study describes the theoretical foundations and factor structure of the newly developed Agency of University Students (AUS) Scale, which assesses students' course-specific agency. In the factor analysis, ten factors emerged. Four of these -Interest and motivation, Self-efficacy, Competence beliefs and Participation activity -are seen to represent individual resources of agency. The other four factors -Equal treatment, Teacher support, Peer support and Trust -represent relational sources of agency. Finally, Opportunities to influence, and Opportunities to make choices represent contextual sources of agency. The psychometric properties and uses of the scale are discussed.

Supporting and constraining factors in the development of university teaching experienced by teachers

“…Instead, it has been shown to concentrate on the means for replicating (or supplementing) existing teaching practices (Kirkwood and Price 2014). Teaching development in higher education focuses on the content that is produced by the current research in each discipline (Su 2011), but it does not typically support students' broader professional development (Jääskelä et al 2016;Trede, Macklin, and Bridges 2012). Furthermore, the development of university teaching has traditionally been seen as an individual endeavour; good practices are not shared, and approaches are often reinvented due to a lack of support among colleagues (Stenfors-Hayes et al 2011).…”

Understanding the Study Experiences of Students in Low Agency Profile: Towards a Smart Education Approach

“…4) for both aforementioned dimensions. Low competence beliefs refer, for example, to student-experienced lack of understanding of the course contents, the lack of basic knowledge, and experiences of the course contents as too challenging, while low self-efficacy refers to students' beliefs in not succeeding well in the course and tasks [10].…”

“…5), which indicates they experience relational resources as less supportive than the students in other profiles. Equal treatment depicts the equality between students and equal treatment of students by the teacher, while trust in teacher and teacher support reflect the attitudes and supportive actions of a teacher [10].…”

“…The research data consist of online questionnaire responses of 292 first and second-year students in three faculties from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The data were collected using the AUS Scale [10,11] consisting of 58 items in a five-point Likert scale (1 = fully disagree, 2 = partly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = partly agree and 5 = fully agree). Higher scores on the Likert scale indicated higher levels of agency.…”

“…Student agency is a multidimensional concept that describes important constituents of intentional and purposeful learning; it emphasizes students' experienced opportunities to influence their learning and their perceptions regarding their capacity to learn in the complex and dynamic learning situations [10,9]. The data is collected using validated Agency of University Students (AUS) Scale measuring students' experiences of their agency in three resource domains and their respective factors: personal domain (2 factors; Competence beliefs and Self-efficacy); relational domain (3 factors; Equal treatment, Teacher support and Trust); and participatory domain (6 factors; Participation activity, Ease of participation, Opportunities to influence, Opportunities to make choices, Interest and utility value, and Peer support) [10,11]. The AUS domains and factors assess learners, pedagogical arrangements, and learning environment being, thus, linked to the three constituents of smart education.…”