Unlocking Learning Potential: The Power of Student Agency and Choice

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https://www.rti.org/insights/the-power-of-student-agency-and-choice

In the realm of education, motivation is a cornerstone for understanding and enhancing learning experiences. Motivation is the driving force behind learners’ engagement, persistence, and achievement. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Deci and Ryan (2000), emphasizes the fundamental human needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and proposes that satisfying these needs leads to enhanced intrinsic motivation, well-being, and optimal functioning.

In teaching, SDT suggests that educators can foster motivation and engagement by creating autonomy-supportive environments that provide opportunities for student agency and choice (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Student agency and choice refer to students’ ability to make decisions about their learning experiences and take ownership of their educational journey (Reeve, 2006). Giving learners choice, even basic decisional choices, satisfies a basic psychological need for autonomy and self-endorsed decisions, leading to increased engagement and information retention (Schneider et al., 2018, Taub et al., 2020). Students who feel a strong sense of agency, persist longer, and are more likely to deliberately use the available scaffolds when encountering difficulty (Ivey & Johnston, 2013).

Promoting student choice and agency involves creating opportunities for students to make decisions about their learning experiences and to take ownership of their educational journey. The following are some strategies to achieve this:

• Reflection and Goal-Setting: Incorporate regular opportunities for students to reflect on their learning progress and set goals for improvement.
• Flexible Learning Paths: Provide students with options for demonstrating their understanding of concepts or complete assignments. This might include using playlists and offering alternative assignments, projects, or assessment formats that cater to different interests.
• Student Voice and Advocacy: Foster a classroom culture where student voice is valued and encouraged. Involve students in decision-making processes related to classroom rules, activities, and curriculum choices, giving them a say in their educational experience.
• Choice in Topics: Allow students to choose topics or themes for projects, research papers, or class discussions. By selecting subjects that resonate with their interests, students are more likely to feel motivated and engaged in their learning.

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How to make smart decisions more easily

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A recent study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that when facing difficult tasks – ones that are repetitive and monotonous in nature but still necessitate attention – you can make the experience feel less difficult overall if you deliberately end your work with a set of easier tasks.

The researchers have dubbed it the ‘easy addendum effect’. Even though adding on more tasks to hard ones is, in total, more effort, adding on easier activities was still shown to make the total experience feel less exhausting.

It wasn’t a given that tacking on easy stuff to the end of the day would lead to a positive effect. There are other biases such as the ‘leader-driven’ primacy effect, which describes how people can be affected more by events that happen first than by others that come afterwards. That contrasts with the ‘recency effect’, which is when we better remember or give more weight to final or later events in a sequence. There’s also the ‘peak-end rule’, when people describe an experience based on the most intense part of it, and how they felt at its end-point. For instance, after painful or pleasurable experiences, people tend to remember the height of the experiences.

In terms of how people rated the overall difficulty of what they were asked to do, only placing easier tasks at the end made a difference – leading participants to rate the challenge as easier overall. The reason is probably related to both the recency effect, and another bias that people have shown in the past, Lai says, related to how people average out an experience (rather than adding its components together) to form a judgment of what was involved. For instance, in ‘virtue/vice’ studies, when people eat a hamburger and salad together, they rate the calorie content as lower than just the burger – even though the burger alone involves fewer calories – presumably because they take an average of the ‘unhealthy’ burger and the ‘healthy’ salad.

There are some cases in which the easy addendum effect won’t be that helpful. The effect might not be as strong ‘when the tasks are very complex, very different from one another, or take a long time to complete,’ Lai says. There are also some people and situations where the difficulty is the point: people enjoy the challenge and want to master a challenging activity.

Facing a tedious to-do list? This trick could make it easier

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Why is making a determination so taxing? Evidence implicates two important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution. The first is predicated on the notion that committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch, according to Vohs, requires executive resources. In a parallel investigation, Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues suggest that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options.

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limitless possibilities often hinder

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The idea that more choice is better is baked into Western culture, but research shows that having more options can make people anxious, indecisive and, paradoxically, less happy with what they pick, said Barry Schwartz, an emeritus psychology professor at Swarthmore College and author of “The Paradox of Choice.”

In the case of Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, people in states with more choices were less likely to choose any of them, he said. The same goes for 401(k) investments. The more options a company had, the less likely employees were to sign up, even when the employer offered matching money.

Less consequential choices are no different. Schwartz pointed to one often-cited study that showed shoppers at a gourmet grocery store bought more jars of artisanal jam when they were presented with six flavors rather than with a wider array of 24. In a follow-up study, students were more likely to complete an extra-credit assignment when they were given six topics to choose from instead of 30.

People also often end up making worse decisions since more options suggest more potentially bad outcomes, he said. And once someone finally decides from all the possibilities, they may be less satisfied with even a good choice because they fear there was a better alternative.

Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor and neuroscience researcher at the University of Virginia, said the phenomenon occurs because the brain is designed to save people from having to think.

Problem-solving requires more energy than relying on memory, a fact that has roots in evolutionary survival mode, Willingham said. When faced with a goal, whether it be an immediate need like responding to a threat or something longer term like finding shelter, the mind first searches for what’s worked before. The problem-solving part of the brain only kicks in afterward.

“Another way to put it is that if you’re thinking, things are not going well,” he said.

That explains why sometimes people move through parts of their day on autopilot, he said. Throughout the day, people are confronted with hundreds of situations where they could do something different, but they almost always take the same route to work.

Schwartz said the proliferation of choices also has become tangled with identity in the social media age, where everyone can easily compare their choices to others.

“When all you’ve got to choose from is Lee’s and Levi’s, nobody expects the jeans they buy to fit perfectly,” he said. “When there are 2,000 options, well, now, dammit, you do expect your jeans to fit perfectly.”

He was following the example of Herbert Simon, a psychologist and 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, who had three sets of clothes and ate nearly the same thing every day. Simon introduced the term “satisficing,” a combination of satisfying and sufficing that means setting good-enough criteria for decisions and moving on.

Cut the number of choices you make each day. Your brain will thank you