Abstract:

Lecture quality in higher education is important to obtain students’ academic satisfaction. However, educational institutions have struggled to control learning achievements because the achievements are highly intangible and heterogenetic. Therefore, the lecture quality measurement models have been established all over the world to determine the relationship between the learning outcomes, academic satisfaction, and student loyalty. However, there is still room for the improvement of the lecture quality evaluation concept from a different perspective.

Our hypothesis is that the level of learning experience (LX) could be an important outcome quality that affects student satisfaction and learning loyalty. The LX level indicates how much students engage in a particular class. The taxonomy of educational objectives states that learning achievements consist of three domains, the cognitive domain, the affective domain, and the psychomotor domain. The cognitive domain includes knowledge and intellectual development and the affective domain involves motivational and behavioral improvements. Many researchers have discussed the relationship between cognitive achievement and academic satisfaction, but the relationship between affective achievement, like the LX, and academic satisfaction has not been explored thoroughly.

Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop a more accurate perceived lecture quality evaluation model in higher education with the LX level. We made three hypothetical models with interrelationships between the perceived learning outcome, student outcome satisfaction, student loyalty, and the LX level. The questionnaire design consists of the four key constructs, and fourteen measurement items were used to assess these constructs. We obtained 149 valid answers from students at three universities in Japan.

Then, structural equation modelling was used to analyze these four factors and the best-suited model was chosen through the model fit indicators. The best model shows that the LX level has a significant positive and direct effect on the lecture satisfaction and the student loyalty. These results generally show that not only cognitive achievements in class, like the learning outcomes, but affective achievements, like the LX level, are related to the students’ academic satisfaction.

In conclusion, we believe that these results contribute to the educational lecture quality measurement in several ways. First, the LX level could be a new quality indicator to assess students’ implicit achievements of learning engagement. Second, the LX level could be an important measurement to predict the students’ learning satisfaction and loyalty.

Keywords:

Learning experience, lecture quality, academic satisfaction, word-of-mouth, loyalty.