The objective of the present study was to investigate the relationships among college students’ achievement motivation (subjective task value and academic self-efficacy), academic procrastination (delay and missing deadlines) and achievement-related behaviours (effort and persistence). More specifically, the study investigated the mediating role of academic procrastination in linking college students’ achievement motivation to their effort and persistence from the perspective of the expectancy-value theory. A total of 584 college students enrolled in a large southern urban university completed a self-report survey for the study. The study suggested two possible pathways that motivate students to persist and put forth greater effort, rooting in students’ academic self-efficacy and subjective task value through their relationships with students’ academic procrastination.

Guided by Expectancy Value Theory (EVT), we investigated the association of students’ engineering self-efficacy and subjective task values (attainment, intrinsic, utility and cost) to four achievement-related behaviours: choice to take more engineering courses, effort in academic tasks, persistence to complete engineering tasks in the face of difficulties, and continuation in the field of engineering. Participants included 163 engineering college students from a large southern metropolitan university in the United States. Bivariate correlations and multiple hierarchical regressions were conducted to examine the relationships among variables. Results showed that engineering self-efficacy and subjective task values (except cost) were positively associated with achievement behaviours respectively. However, once the set of subjective task values were entered in the regression models, self-efficacy did not explain significant unique variance for any of the achievement-related behaviours. Intrinsic interest emerged as the most consistent predictor of achievement-related behaviours when controlling for self-efficacy and the other four task value dimensions.

While the current literature provides valuable insight into how school climate and student motivation impact academic achievement, research examining the mediating effects of motivation in the linking of school climate perceptions and achievement is limited. The current study employed structural equation modeling to examine a model that illustrates the role of self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation in the linking of student perceptions of school climate (teacher/student relationship, order/safety/discipline, fairness/clarity of school rules) to reading and mathematics achievement. Analysis used data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002, 2004) that were gathered in a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (2004) and are representative of a national sample of 14,639 10th grade students. The results showed that the hypothesized model fit the data well supporting the hypothesis that student self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation play a mediating role in the linking of perceptions of school climate with reading and mathematics achievement. Additionally, students' perceptions of school climate related significantly with both achievement outcomes, and perceptions of school climate concerning teacher/student relationship related significantly with all motivation variables both self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation.