Examining structural relations among motivation, behavior, and performance in writing

Writing is a particularly demanding activity, which poses unique motivational challenges for students. This study sought to examine the contribution of writing motivation and writing frequency (an understudied variable in writing research) to students’ writing performance. The objectives were twofold: a) examining structural relations among two motivational variables (i.e., self-efficacy and attitudes), a behavioural variable (i.e., writing frequency), and writing performance; b) analysing whether and how these relations vary across two text genres (viz., narrative text and opinion text) and across two educational levels (i.e., students in grades 5-6 and grades 7-8). Six hundred and five Portuguese students from grades 5 to 8 participated in this study. Students filled in self-report scales and wrote narrative and opinion texts. We conducted multiple-group structural equation modeling to analyse the data. The results showed that for narrative texts, digital writing frequency was significantly associated with text quality for students in grades 7-8, but this relation was not significant in students from grades 5-6. Attitudes were associated with literary and digital writing frequency across educational levels. Additionally, both attitudes and self-efficacy for self-regulation made a direct contribution to narrative text quality across educational levels. As for opinion texts, no significant educational level differences emerged. Again, attitudes contributed to literary and digital writing frequency as well as to opinion text quality across educational levels. This study underlines the pivotal role of motivational variables—especially attitudes—to students’ writing performance.

Publication year:2021