This systematic review asks a specific and practically useful question: what does the research literature actually show about how student voice and agency operate in middle school settings, and how well does that literature account for the distinctive developmental characteristics of young adolescents? The review covers peer-reviewed empirical studies from 2015 to 2024, yielding 37 studies after screening against PRISMA guidelines across eight databases and three specialist middle grades journals.
The authors begin by wrestling with the definitional problem that plagues the field. “Student voice” has been used inconsistently across the literature — sometimes meaning classroom discussion, sometimes school policy input, sometimes critical dialogue. They adopt a working definition drawn from Holquist et al. (2023): student voice practices are strategies that invite student feedback on, input into, or collaborative decision-making about educational planning, delivery, assessment or reform. Student agency is defined as students’ ability to purposefully influence their own learning experiences and environment. The pairing of these two concepts is treated as especially important in the middle grades context, where adolescents’ developing need for autonomy makes meaningful participation in school decisions directly relevant to their engagement and motivation.
The 37 studies are organised into three overarching themes. The first and largest theme, accounting for 46% of studies, is passive student voice and agency — researcher-driven work that solicits students’ perspectives and opinions but does not involve students as active participants in change. In these studies, student voice is consultative rather than transformative: researchers centre students’ views to answer research questions, but students themselves are not partners in designing or implementing change. The insights generated are nonetheless valuable — studies in this category examined students’ experiences of standardised testing, peer relationships, school climate, declining academic motivation and the conditions that affect their engagement. The limitation is that the benefits to students are indirect; knowledge is produced about students rather than with them.
The second theme, covering 40% of studies, is active student voice and agency — research in which students are genuine partners in improving their learning environments. This includes action research projects, participatory action research (PAR), student-teacher partnerships to improve curriculum and pedagogy, social action projects, and co-research arrangements where students co-investigate problems that matter to them. The benefits in this category tend to be direct and observable: students gain confidence, develop critical thinking, experience respect for their contributions, and in some cases produce outcomes that materially change school practices. Several studies show students providing teachers with knowledge they did not otherwise have — about technology, about what makes science classrooms more responsive, about the social dynamics of groupwork. A notable example involves students whose PAR project on school lunch led directly to changes in school meal decision-making.
The third and smallest theme, comprising 14% of studies, is activating the inner voice and agency — work that helps students reflect on their own learning, identity and sense of self. This category sits between passive and active, as it is researcher-designed but student-experienced. Studies here engaged students in understanding their own identity construction, their experiences of racism, and their metacognitive processes. The authors note this area is underdeveloped in the literature despite its strong alignment with the developmental needs of early adolescents who are actively constructing identity.
Across all three themes, the review identifies several significant gaps. Culturally responsive pedagogy was addressed in only 10 of 37 studies. International perspectives appeared in only 5 studies, meaning the literature is heavily dominated by US contexts. Research on students’ sense of self and peer perceptions, despite being central to young adolescent development, was underexplored. The review also flags that most research takes place in content classrooms (19 studies) or at the building level (11 studies), with elective classrooms and student survey contexts receiving far less attention. The majority of student participation across studies was classified as consultative rather than transformative — meaning that despite the aspirational language of voice and agency, most research stops well short of genuine student partnership in decision-making.
The authors conclude with a call for more research into active and transformative forms of student voice and agency, particularly in middle grade contexts where the developmental case for it is strongest, and for studies that examine what genuine student partnership does to motivation, engagement, belonging and achievement.