Board 51: An Initial Step Toward Measuring First-Generation College Students’ Personal Agency: A Scale Validation

This research paper describes the development of a scale to measure how first-generation college students use engineering as a tool for making a difference in their community and world or personal agency. Personal agency is a capability that every individual holds; it is described by Bandura as an individual’s beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives through purposeful and reflective actions. Agentic actions allow students to explore, maneuver and impact their environment for the achievement of a goal or set of goals. This study identifies how cognitive processes of forethought, intention, reactivity, and reflection shape a students’ agentic behavior and together influence first-generation college students’ goal of making a difference in their community through their engineering degree. Data for this study came from a large-scale survey of 3,711 first-year engineering students. First, the personal agency scale was tested for validity evidence using a split-half sampling technique. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted on one half, and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the other half. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale to measure personal agency is valid and reliable for the first-generation college student population. The results of this work situate first-generation college students in engineering as active contributors to their environment. This study is an initial step in examining how first-generation college students are active producers of their own lives and not passive recipients of their life’s circumstances. Personal agency can be used as a lens to understand how underrepresented students in engineering are empowered to act upon their world to (re)shape it. This theoretical framing and measurement support asset-based approaches to understanding a community of students who are often deficit theorized. Introduction: Who are First-Generation College Students? A first-generation college student is a broad term defined by parental level of education. Firstgeneration college students include a diverse group of students who are dedicated to their pathways into and through higher education and aspire to serve their communities through their postsecondary educational attainment. For example, a first-generation college student is Elizabeth, a committed electrical engineering (EE) student who said, “I never said, ‘I’m not going to finish it or I’m going to do business instead of EE.’ ... No, that was never an option for me ... I think those who do change their major I think they’re weak or not committed ... commit, just do it, nothing comes easy, nobody gives you anything for free, you need to work for it” [1, p. 276]. A firstgeneration college student is also Bianca, whose aspirations to study engineering were altruistic and rooted in supporting students from her community. She said, “I wanted to do something that had to do with education, helping the students, bringing more Hispanics into science ... if I do engineering I can ... be a role model for other students ...” [2, p. 11]. Bianca’s aspirations to be a role model to other underrepresented students like herself came from her personal experience, “Nobody told me I had the potential to do science ... but I believe that I have potential and I believe that a lot of Latino students in high school ... they [teachers and/or administrators] see them more like they are going to drop out of high school, they are not going to graduate and they see them as a lost cause, and in them, there are so much potential” [1, p. 276]. Additionally, a first-generation college student is Sam, a first-year engineering student, who grew up moving from place to place “depending on how rent was in the area ... It was very difficult to have a place to live. Sometimes rent was short.” Nevertheless, she “kept good math scores” and was considered an elite math student. She said, “ I was in a small class ... we were taking Algebra I as seventh graders, which was not the norm for the district I was part of. They called us the elite.” Sam, in her senior year in high school, was taking a multivariable calculus course in college. Lastly, a first-generation college student is Lupe, a sixth-year mechanical engineering student whose stated, “I don’t feel like an engineer” because she struggled in some of her courses; nevertheless, she held aspirations to make a difference with her degree. “One thing I do want to do with my degree is be able to give back to a community,” she shared. Specifically, Lupe desired to give back to her mother, “I wanna make money to help my mom, to get her out of what we are in now ... I would see that she would sometimes have to work two jobs just to help pay the rent at the time and she owned a house ... Unfortunately, we lost the house so now we're renting.” In sum, first-generation college students are shaped and reshape by their environment; they are agentic individuals, informed by the past, oriented towards the future, and adapt to the present [3]. National reports, for example from the National Center for Education Statistics, have produced findings about the current state of first-generation college students [4] or how to bridge the academic gap in postsecondary success [5]. However, these reports often frame first-generation college students as products of their circumstances rather than as agentic actors navigating a mixture of environments (i.e., environments that are imposed, selected, and constructed). In this work, we focus on understanding how first-generation engage with their environment in ways that require them to exercise their personal agency; they are not passive recipients of their life circumstances rather active producers entangled in imposed, selected, constructed environments. These forms of environmental structures require the exercise of personal agency at different degrees and scope [6]; whereas students can actively shape their surroundings, their surroundings also shape them [3], [7], [8]. First-generation college students’ daily interaction with individuals or situations (e.g., institution, classes, family, neighborhood, work, etc.) either constrain or enable them to take on particular roles and make a change in their world. Students’ reaction and choices made in response to their imposed environment constitute their selected environment. For example, Elizabeth’s imposed environment was the demanding curriculum in electrical engineering. While she acknowledged the curriculum was challenging and many people transfer out, she selected to remain in the rigorous environment. Choosing to stay in electrical engineering, Elizabeth constructed her environment by actively engaging with the course content, acquiring new knowledge and behaviors, leading her to degree completion [1]. First-generation college students, viewed as agentic actors, are capable of acting and changing their environment or world around them. An individuals’ agency and its interaction with society have been outlined in spaces such as anthropology [9], psychology [6], [10], [11], life course studies [7], [8], [12], and the social sciences [13]. Emirbayer and Mische [3] highlighted the complexity and confusion around agency, observing that many scholars have shied away from opening the “black box” or have conceptualized agency as freedom, purposiveness, or choice, albeit “maintain[ing] an elusive ... vagueness” [3, p. 962]. We used Bandura’s social cognitive theory [6], [11] and conceptualization of agency to define the construct and develop a measurement of agency for first-generation college students. Theoretical Framework Social Cognitive Theory through an Agentic Perspective Social cognitive theory is a learning theory, derived from behaviorist and social learning frameworks [14]. Social cognitive theory contains elements of learning as both constructivist (i.e., emphasizing the learner as active in their construction and reorganization of knowledge) and socioculturalist views (i.e., emphasizing that the learner is embedded within sociocultural practices of teaching and learning) [15]. Social cognitive theory posits that peoples’ performance, are neither solely driven by inner forces nor automatically shaped and controlled by external forces, rather people’s performance can be understood in terms of a model of triadic reciprocity, where people are actors, producers, and receivers of their environment [16]. In Bandura’s more recent work, he moves social cognitive theory to embrace an agentic perspective of human development, adaptation, and change [6], [14], [17]. Specifically, personal agency helps acknowledge that individuals are neither autonomous nor mechanical conveyers, but rather are contributors to “their own motivation and action within a system of triadic reciprocal causation” [16, p. 1175]. Personal agency is situated within a triadic reciprocal causation model, where reciprocal causality suggests an individual is a product of a complex interplay between personal factors, behavioral patterns, and the environment [11], see Figure 1. Figure 1. Bandura’s Triadic Model of Reciprocal Causation [16], more recently proposed through a personal agency perspective [6], [14], [17] Personal factors, are forms of “cognized goals, quality of analytic thinking, and affective selfreactions,” self-efficacy, expected outcomes, motivation, and dispositions to name a few [18, p. 191]. Behavioral factors in social cognitive theory constitute knowledge acquisition through new ideas and practice. Lastly, environmental factors are not monolithic, there are three environmental structures distinguished in social cognitive theory, environments that are imposed, selected, and constructed [19]. An imposed environment may include “situations an individual must interact with on a daily basis (e.g., neighborhood, school, work, and family)” [20, p. 99]. Personal agency, in a psychological pers