The dynamics of the stages of formation of agency of students in the developmental environment of a project-based educational program

Abstract

The article describes the dynamics of agency formation stages in students participating in a specialized twoweek project aimed at developing research competencies. The psychological block of the program curriculum was based on the eco-psychological model (V. I. Panov) describing the ontological continuum of transitions from the subject of spontaneous activity (the ‘subject of motivation’ stage) to the subject of arbitrary action (the ‘creator’ stage). The hypothesis of the study was that the program would increase the participants’ level of development of the stages of agency formation. As both sequential and, simultaneously, parallel formation of stages was likely, we studied the change in the structure of agency (coefficients of integrity and connectivity of stages) along with the dynamics of the development of individual stages. The study was conducted on three groups of secondary school students who took part in the full-time program for two weeks in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The total sample included 56 schoolchildren aged 14-16 years, of which 40 were females. We used a questionnaire to diagnose the stages of agency formation (the school version). Surveys were carried out on the first and last days of classes of the program, then we used the Wilcoxon criterion to check the statistical significance of the changes. The hypothesis of the study was partially confirmed. There were significant changes in the level of formation of individual stages neither in any separate sample, nor in the aggregate sample, nor by gender. We found positive dynamics of the coefficients of the integrity of the stages, as well as the coefficients of the connectivity of the stages ‘subject of motivation’, ‘observer’, ‘apprentice’, ‘student’, ‘critic’, ‘master’ — this indicates the formation of the structure of agency both at the reproductive level and at an arbitrary level. The exception was the coefficient of connectivity for the ‘creator’ stage. This may well be explained by the fact that, in the course of classes, some students decided to stop at the achieved level (the ‘master’ stage) and finalize it in their research project, and some of the students cultivated a desire to develop the product of their project, and this nonlinearity of the stage development did not lead to an unambiguous influence of the ‘creator’ stage on the structure of the stages of agency formation