Student agency at the crux: Mitigating disengagement in middle and high school

Considerable evidence indicates that students' academic motivation and engagement generally decline as they move through middle school and on to high school. This study applied social cognitive theory to explore how self-efficacy and perceived control-two main factors of personal agency-may play a role in mitigating this decline in engagement and further contribute to academic performance. We used dual change score modeling to examine the dynamic structure of personal agency and disengagement during grades 8-10 for a large sample of students from the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. In that model, we analyzed how those variables predicted grade point average and attendance for students at the end of 10th grade. Students did not necessarily become more disengaged as a result of lower perceptions of control, rather they became more disengaged without the resilience factor of self-efficacy. The actual influence of disengagement on attendance and academic performance appears to be far weaker than the role of personal agency factors. Our results indicate that when student's self-efficacy drops, disengagement in school increases during the years transitioning to high school. Increased disengagement weakens perceived control and change in both the control and self-efficacy dimensions of personal agency drive academic performance. Schools should prioritize the development of personal agency in each student during the middle school to high school transition years.