The effect of teacher agency support, students’ personal perseverance and work experience on student agency in secondary schools with Estonian and Russian instructional language

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how teacher agency support, students’ perseverance and work experience outside of school are related to student agency in the context of Estonia, where Estonian and Russian-speaking students are often educated separately in schools with either Estonian or Russian instructional language. The student-level data (n = 9060) were collected after piloting the survey instrument in 2022. To ascertain the factors and common causes that correlate with student agency, which is measured in a scale constructed by factor analysis, a structural equation modelling analysis was conducted. Besides the main positive effects of teacher agency support, students’ perseverance and work experience on student agency, other statistically positive covariates were found to be Estonian instructional language, male gender, higher school stage and students’ socio-economic background as measured in number of books at home. Among different types of work experience, working on holidays, in student work camps, doing other paid work (i.e., working in their own business), and voluntary unpaid work were significantly positively correlated with the agency. Therefore, students learned many specific and generic skills while working. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of teacher support and work experience in fostering student agency. The type of agency measured in this scale, which combines agentic engagement in the classroom with capacity for resistance to perceived injustice, is more articulated by male students in higher school stages.

Keywords

• Student agency
• learning at work
• generic competences
• ethnic minority
• Hengtao Tang, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA
• Theories of Learning