Considering Agentic Engagement in Higher Education: A Scoping Review

Agentic engagement is an often-overlooked dimension of student engagement in higher education, despite its association with various positive academic outcomes. Therefore, the exploration and mapping of this concept may contribute to higher education scholarship on teaching and learning focused on student-centredness. This scoping review aims to map current literature on agentic engagement over the last decade with the purpose of conceptualising agentic engagement as central to higher education teaching and learning as well as to identify research gaps within existing knowledge. A scoping review was performed, using a variety of reputable databases and covering peer-reviewed articles published between January 2014 and January 2024. A total of 33 articles met the inclusion criteria. The findings show that from a conceptual point of view, the development of agentic engagement has been limited. A key finding is that despite a growing interest in agentic engagement since 2020, there is currently no literature on agentic engagement from Southern Africa. In addition, existing research on agentic engagement does not present triangulated findings in which data were collected simultaneously from different populations. This study identified four main themes in the current literature on agentic engagement, namely digital learning environments, dimensions of student engagement, collaborative partnership, and self-regulated learning. Owing to the hiatus in the conceptualisation of agentic engagement and the lacuna in scholarly attention in Southern Africa, there is a need for both conceptualisation and context-specific research from this region.