From Teaching to Learning Agency: Developing and Validating a Framework for Student-Centered Pedagogy in Contemporary Education

Abstract

The transition from teacher-centered instruction toward student-centered pedagogy represents a major development in contemporary educational theory and practice. Yet the conceptual mechanisms through which student-centered pedagogical practices foster students’ capacity to act purposefully within learning environments remain insufficiently specified. In particular, student agency is frequently discussed alongside autonomy, engagement, participation, self-regulated learning, student voice, and empowerment without adequate conceptual differentiation, contributing to theoretical fragmentation and inconsistent measurement. This study proposes the Student Learning Agency Framework (SLAF), a multidimensional model explaining how specific student-centered pedagogical practices may cultivate students’ agentic capacities. The framework conceptualizes learning agency through interrelated dimensions of intentional action, strategic self-regulation, participatory influence, reflective adaptation, and perceived capacity to influence learning processes. Six pedagogical conditions learner choice, dialogic teaching, formative feedback, collaborative learning, reflective practice, and participation in educational decision-making are proposed as antecedents of learning agency. A multi-stage instrument-development and validation study is designed to test the framework. The proposed methodology incorporates construct specification, expert content validation, cognitive pretesting, pilot testing, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability assessment, convergent and discriminant validity testing, structural equation modelling, and measurement-invariance analysis. Rather than treating student-centered education as a collection of instructional techniques, the proposed framework theorizes it as an educational environment capable of redistributing opportunities for intentional, reflective, and consequential student action. The study is presented as an empirical research protocol; consequently, no findings are fabricated or anticipated as observed results. The framework is intended to contribute to educational theory by clarifying the conceptual boundaries of learning agency and providing an empirically testable explanation of how pedagogical practices may support its development.