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1. Defining and Observing Families' Epistemic Agency During Science Center Visits

   https://doi.org/10.3102/2014793  

   Letourneau, S.M.; Schloss, D.; Perez, S.; Argudo, Y.; Baburyan, M.; Curto, K.; Gomez, E.; McDonald, T.; Multani, S.; Taylor, T.; et al (May 2023, AERA)

   Supporting learners’ agency in constructing and using STEM knowledge is critical not only for fostering deeper learning, but also for making STEM education more equitable and inclusive. Informal learning environments like museums and science centers often prioritize agency within hands-on and interactive learning experiences, but few studies have defined what agency looks like within these spaces. The current study uses theoretical understandings of epistemic agency as a lens for understanding families’ experiences in science centers. A team of researchers, exhibit designers, educators, and museum facilitators collaboratively generated a working definition of agency in the context of families’ science center visits, and created a reflection tool to help museum practitioners notice observable aspects of agency in families’ interactions at STEM exhibits. 

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2. Designing and enacting lessons to promote students’ epistemic agency in middle school biology classrooms

   Akçil-Okan, Ö.; Tekkumru-Kisa, M.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2023, Annual Meeting of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching)

   Reform-based instruction that fosters all students’ intellectual engagement and sensemaking is possible. However, it is not yet prevalent across many science classrooms. To gain more insight into how to design and enact science instruction supporting students’ intellectual engagement, this investigation centered on understanding how to design and implement science lessons for promoting students’ intellectual engagement as epistemic agents who shape knowledge building happening in the classroom. We examined a middle school science teacher's design and implementation of four lessons that she did as part of a PD focused on fostering productive science talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed that her efforts in fostering opportunities for students’ epistemic agency were evident in both her lesson design and implementation. Her responsiveness to students’ thinking/intellectual engagement throughout the lesson implementations via principled improvisations supported opportunities for students’ epistemic agency. Her efforts allow us to understand how the design and implementation of science lessons with the focus of opening space and maintaining this space by being responsive to students’ thinking are critical for fostering students’ epistemic agency. These findings can provide implications for professional development efforts that seek to develop teachers’ capacity for reform-based instruction in science classrooms. 

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3. WIP: Developing Agency Through A Rising Doctoral Institute

   Peyton, J; Artiles, MS; Cruz, JM; Matusovich, HM; Adams, SG (October 2025, Frontiers in Education IEEE Proceedings)

   Doctoral students from underrepresented groups in engineering tend to complete their degrees at lower rates than their White and International peers. Research indicates that early support in doctoral programs, rather than later remedial efforts, can lead to long-term success. To that effect, we designed the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI), an early information intervention for minoritized doctoral students. In this work in progress, we specifically explore how this intervention supports doctoral student agency throughout the first year of the doctoral experience We address the following questions: 1) How can agency be encouraged/promoted among minority students in the first year of the engineering PhD? Employing a longitudinal qualitative design, we conducted monthly interviews with six participants throughout their first year of doctoral study in engineering programs. We ground our work in Klemenčič’s Student Agency Model, focused on experiences affecting their persistence, to help uncover different aspects of agency that can manifest throughout this period of time. Preliminary results reveal that students cultivate agency through self-regulation, self-direction, self-determination, and self-efficacy, evident in their planning, motivation, and community engagement. Future work will focus on uncovering the specific mechanisms through which agency is enhanced. By linking positive first-year experiences to agency development, this research can guide interventions and tools for engineering departments to support student persistence. 

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4. Agency in Framing Design Problems

   Svihla, V.; Peele-Eady, T.; Chen, Y. (April 2019, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting Program)

   Supporting students to direct their own learning is challenging. Here, we introduce framing agency, a construct defined as taking up opportunities to make consequential decisions about problems and how to proceed in learning and developing solutions. We analyzed two cases of student teams to describe framing agency in practice. We argue framing agency clarifies the kinds of learning experiences students need to overcome past experiences dominated by solving archetypical well-structured problems with predetermined solutions. Both teams faced impasses; one navigated the impasse by framing the problem, whereas the other treated the problem as given. Using sociolinguistic content analysis, we identify markers of agency in students’ talk. We compare and contrast the cases to illuminate nuances of framing agency. 

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5. Structure, Agency, and Improvisation in Human-Led Digital Interactive Narrative Exercises

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v21i1.36827  

   Fisher, Mira; Siler, Molly; Ware, Stephen G (November 2025, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment)

   Supporting high-agency player experiences without compromising narrative control is one of the major challenges in digital interactive narrative design. Humans, on the other hand, frequently meet this challenge when cooperating to improvise a narrative. We present a study examining how humans improvise narratives when paired together as the player and game master of a digital interactive narrative. We collected gameplay logs from these experiences, as well as participants’ reported perceptions of narrative structure, personal agency, and the reasons for both their choices and their partners’. We found a strong link between perceptions of structure and of agency. We also found a tendency for participants to better identify the goals of their partner’s actions following sessions where game masters expressed higher agency. Finally, we characterize the experiences using principles of improv theatre, drawing from the data to analyze negative experiences of agency as failures in the improv partnership. 

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