Predicting Faculty Intentions to Assign Writing in Their Classes

Abstract

Teachers who offer undergraduate courses agree widely on the importance of writing assignments to further undergraduate education. And yet, there is a great deal of variance among teachers in their writing assignments; some teachers assign no writing whatsoever. To determine the variables that influence the decisions of teachers about whether to assign writing, we predicted their intentions to assign writing from attitudes, subjective norms, perceived control, and perceived difficulty pertaining to assigning writing. Zero order correlations and hierarchical regression analyses implicate attitude and perceived difficulty as the most important predictors of teacher’s intentions to assign writing in two studies. We also obtained open-ended belief statements in Study 1 and used them to obtain quantitative belief data in Study 2 to find and validate the importance of the impact of particular specific beliefs on intentions to assign writing.