Components of Students' Grade Expectations for Public Speaking Assignments

Although previous research has linked students' expected grades to numerous pedagogical variables, this factor has been all but ignored by instructional communication scholars. In the present study, 315 undergraduates were presented with grading scenarios representing differing combinations of course rigor, teacher immediacy, and student self-efficacy. For each scenario, students estimated the numerical grades they would expect to receive on basic course speaking assignments. Componential analysis (Kenny, 1994) was used to decompose expected speech scores into perceiver, target, and the unique reactions of individual respondents, which respectively accounted for 20.4%, 60.2%, and 19.4% of the variable of interest. Within the target effect, student perceptions of how they had prepared and performed in classroom speaking situations represented the largest single variance subcomponent (31.4%), followed by perceptions of course rigor (23.3%) and teacher immediacy (5.5%). Recommendations for future research and instructional practice are advanced.