RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
The Role of Syllabi in Measuring Teaching: Comparing Planned and Enacted Behavior
Page: 441
Syllabi contain information about an instructor’s teaching and have been used as a measure of change in response to professional development. Syllabus scores have been linked to more widely used and resource intensive measures of change, including observations and surveys. We used the theory of planned behavior to examine the relationship between syllabus scores and self reported teaching practices and tested for changes in these measures in response to professional development. We found syllabi scores can approximate instructor teaching intentions, which seemed to manifest in their use of teaching practices. Instructor’s teaching intentions changed in response to PD, but their teaching practices did not. These findings are consistent with the theory of planned behavior, indicating that intentions change before behaviors, which supports the use of syllabi as a measure of change that can be economically deployed and detect nascent changes in teaching practices.