Chapter 9: Sociocultural Forces that Encourage and Restrict Students’ Agentic Engagement

Yena exemplifies an agentically engaged student. In this chapter, we focus on Yena because our program of research confirms that students like Yena tend to fare much better in and out of school than her more externally regulated peers (Bardach et al., 2023; Reeve et al., 2020a; Yin et al., 2025). While research shows the benefits of agentic engagement, sociocultural forces sometimes see and prioritize things differently. Sometimes sociocultural forces interfere with students’ agency and self-determination to instead steer students toward externally and socially regulated learning and developing. In the present chapter, we define agentic engagement, explain its benefits, identify the costs of restrictive sociocultural forces, and offer recommendations for how educators and future programs of research can modulate sociocultural forces to encourage and support agentic engagement in students like Yena.