The effect of student-faculty interaction on major commitment and learning outcomes by airline service major students: a moderated mediation effect of major satisfaction

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Introduction. Airline service major students learn various knowledge and skills to be flight attendants. In the practical classes, they have higher student-faculty interaction than students majoring in other majors. Thus, major satisfaction is an important to increase learning outcomes through major commitment. This study focuses on student-faculty interaction, major commitment, and major satisfaction to improve learning outcomes among airline service major students. Methods. The participants in this study were 284 airline service major students from three universities. Data were collected from freshmen (19.7%), sophomore (39.1%), junior (29.6%), and senior (11.6%) students majoring in airline service. This study used SPSS Win.21.0 statistics programs to conduct the frequency test, reliability and correlation tests. For the moderated mediation analysis, ‘Model 14 of PROCESS macro ver.4.0’ was used as the statistical method. Results. First, student-faculty interaction had positive correlations with both major commitment (β = .5521, p<.01) and learning outcomes (β = .2162, p<.01). Major commitment had a positive correlation with learning outcomes (β = 1.4654, p < .01). Second, major satisfaction was found to have conditional indirect effects on the relationship between student-faculty interaction and learning outcomes through major commitment that were significant (p < .01) when the major satisfaction values were 3.6667 (.3525, .2257~ .4830), 4.6667 (.2281, .1231 ~.3642) and 5.0000 (.1866, .0691 ~.3383), respectively. Therefore, the moderated mediation effect of major satisfaction was verified. Conclusions. This study found that airline service major students with high student-faculty interaction have increased learning outcomes. The results of this study indicate that students’ major satisfaction should be fostered and reinforced with the goal of increasing airline service major students’ major commitment and improving their learning outcomes.