Learner agency in a chemical engineering curriculum: Perceptions and critical thinking

The extent to which learners have scope and opportunity to direct and influence their own approach to learning activities, what may be termed ‘learner agency’, has been shown to be important for students across many disciplines, in developing key advanced skills and qualities such as self-efficacy, critical thinking, resilience and innovative problem-solving. Employers unsurprisingly value graduates able to exhibit and cope with agency in their approach to work through such elements as self-learning ability, capacity to formulate and solve open-ended problems, coping with unfamiliar situations, and effective teamwork. Here, through a student-led and student-designed research project using questionnaire and interview methodology, we explore via the perceptions of students themselves how a typical UK Chemical Engineering BEng/MEng curriculum provides opportunities for agency and how students feel they cope with agency. We examine the curriculum class-by-class and year-by-year, studying correlations and patterns in the types of learning activity which students perceive as enabling them to exert influence and control over learning. In follow-up one-to-one interviews we further examine the link between perceived degree of agency and critical thinking skills, as measured by standardized scales, to explore how perceived agency-delivering activities may correlate with actual developments in thinking styles and skills.