Personal Agency and Career Development of Adolescent Learners

Aim: Personal agency has to do with learners’ capacity to reflect, set goals, act with intentions, forethought, self-regulate, and acting responsibly to effect change. In this light, this study sets out to investigate personal agency and career development of adolescent learners. The research question was what is the effect of self-regulation in the career development of adolescent learners. Methods: The study was anchored on three core theories which are: Bruner’s (1985) Spiral Curriculum, Vygotsky’s (1978) Theory of Sociocultural Development and Super’s (1990) developmental theory of self-concept. The concurrent mixed method research design was used in conducting this study. Three hundred (300) adolescent students were purposively selected from five secondary schools in the Bamenda Municipality of the North West Region of Cameroon. These schools are Government Bilingual High School Bayelle, Government Bilingual High School Atiela, Government Bilingual High School Bamenda, Saint Paul’s College Nkwen and Christ The King Secondary School. A structured questionnaire and a semi-structured interview guide were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Results: Looking at the results from the regression analysis, the R-Square for the overall model is 0.606 with an adjusted R of 0.605. This suggests that 60.6% of the variations in students’ career choices can be accounted for by self-regulation. It further shows that F (458.482) with p=0.000. This suggests that there is a significant effect of self-regulation on students’ career choice. Consequently, Ho is rejected and Ha accepted. Conclusion: Self-regulation has a significant positive effect on students’ career choice. Recommendation: The government should enact policies that will enable training of teachers and enable them teach self-regulated learning skills to learners, and provide learning environments that give learners the latitude to act, take responsibility and actively direct the desired learning outcome for themselves.