Teaching Effectiveness, Course Evaluation, and Academic Performance: The Role of Academic Delay of Gratification

Abstract

Academic delay of gratification is a significant and positive predictor of students’ final course grades, even after controlling for the effect of their rating of the course, expected grade, and degree of interest, importance, and utility of the academic task. Students’ expected course grades are by far the strongest predictor of their final course grades. This suggests a student's expected grade in a course is associated with academic achievement in that course. Because expectation of grades alone should not be the focus of students’ motivation, students need to learn how to use other factors to motivate themselves and to develop learning strategies that support mastery and a mastery orientation. Students’ ratings of a course are not a significant predictor of their final course grades, which suggests that students’ perception of the course are not directly associated with the grades they obtained in the course. This suggests that academic delay of gratification helps students to orchestrate their academic progress, enactment of goals, task completion, and eventual academic achievement. Judging by its role in predicting students’ final course grades, academic delay of gratification explains a statistically significant amount of variance in students’ academic achievement.