Supporting Student Agency in Undergraduate Biomedical Education

Despite the high demand for biomedical talent, many capable students fail to persist in biomedical majors and careers due to science education that does not adequately support their engagement. Some of this problem is because science courses and careers are presented in ways that do not align with students’ preferences, needs, and values. Bolstering student agency is a promising and innovative strategy that could address this issue. Nascent but growing correlational and experimental research suggests that supporting students’ agency has the potential to shift aspects of student motivation for science and subjective experience in science classes, as well as instructors’ practice in the classroom, bringing the science education that students are provided into alignment with their needs and goals. The purpose of this investigation is to examine the effectiveness of an intervention designed to promote agency among college students in introductory classes required in biomedical science majors. A longitudinal, cluster-randomized, active control experiment across multiple universities will be conducted to test the hypothesis that an intervention promoting agency (i.e., training students to adopt a malleable mindset of their science motivation and classroom environment and use a variety of agentic engagement strategies) supports students’ initial persistence and achievement in biomedical science via psychological and environmental processes (Aim 1), as well as their sustained persistence and achievement up to 4 years following the start of the intervention study (Aim 2). Persistence and achievement outcomes include course grades, GPA, course-taking, biomedical degree obtainment, and career/graduate program intentions. Proximal process variables include reports of students’ agentic mindset, engagement, interest, psychological needs, self-efficacy, and perceived belonging, as well as reports and observations of classroom motivating practices. The addition of a condition combining the student-focused agency intervention with a training intervention for science instructors on encouraging students’ agency, autonomy, and motivation will provide the opportunity to examine the added benefit of training teachers over and above the benefits of the student-focused intervention alone (Aim 3). Finally, this large, well-powered intervention study will allow for the exploration of variation in the agency intervention across various student and classroom characteristics (Aim 4). This research is a critical step toward creating a cost-and-time-efficient, scalable intervention to support student persistence in biomedical sciences.