Academic Procrastination: A Review of Research on Theory and Practice
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This document summarizes research on academic procrastination. It discusses several categories of research: prevalence and correlates, personality factors like perfectionism and neuroticism, biological influences like gender and eveningness, procrastination as a coping mechanism or failure of self-regulation, and whether procrastination can enhance performance. The document also reviews limited research on practices to address procrastination in the classroom, finding that brief instructor interventions and less flexible deadlines may help reduce procrastination. Overall, the document provides an overview of the various theoretical perspectives and empirical findings regarding the causes and consequences of academic procrastination.
Academic Procrastination: A Review of Research on Theory and Practice
- 1. Company LOGO Academic Procrastination A Review of Research on Theory and Practice
- 2. Procrastination • How many of you, when working on this project, delayed beginning or completing the assignment? – What were the reasons you delayed this task? – Do you delay more in some classes than others? 2
- 3. Academic Procrastination • Research on Procrastination can be thought of as falling into several categories: – Prevalance and General Correlates – Personality – Biology – As a Coping Mechanism – As a Failure in Self-Regulation – As a Performance Enhancing Behavior – Practice with Procrastination in the Classroom 3
- 4. Prevalence • Solomon and Rothblum (1984) found that 46% of students procrastinate on writing, 26% on studying for exams, and 30% on reading. • Rothblum, Solomon, and Murakami (1986) found 40% were high in self-identified procrastination. • Onwuegbuzie (2004) found that 40-60% of graduate students procrastinate on writing papers, and 60-75% want to decrease procrastination. 4
- 5. Correlates • Those high in anxiety are more likely to report anxiety and somatic complaints (Rothblum, Solomon, & Murakami, 1986) • Those who procrastinate also tend to increase gradually in their level of stress, somatic complaints, and visits to healthcare providers over the course of a semester (Tice & Baumeister, 1997) 5
- 6. Correlates, contd. • There is mixed evidence on the academic effects of procrastination. – Watson, Powell, and Buro (2006) found no correlation between procrastination and grades. – Owens and Newbegin (2000) and Tice and Baumeister (1997) found significant negative relationships between procrastination and grades. 6
- 7. Personality • Perfectionism – Perfectionism can be defined many ways (positive versus negative (Terry-Short, Owens, Slade, & Dewey, 1995); self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed (Hewitt, Flett, Turnbull-Donovan, & Mikail, 1991)). – Socially prescribed perfectionism seems to bear the strongest relationship to procrastination (Flett, Blankenstein, Hewitt, & Koledin, 1992; Onwuegbuzie, 2000; Saddler, 1999). – Positive/negative perfectionism does not show a reliable relationship to procrastination (Burns, Dittman, Nguyen, and Mitchelson, 2000) 7
- 8. Personality, contd. • Neuroticism – Can be anxiety, guild, depression, low self-esteem, tension, irrationality, shyness, etc. The difference between stable emotional development and maladjustment (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Eysenk, Barret, Wilson & Jackson, 1992) – In a meta-analysis, there was a modest relationship between neuroticism and procrastination (r = -.24). Within the Eysenck and Eysenck framework, the association seems to be stronger (Hess, Sherman, & Goodman, 2000) than in the Big Five framework (Johnson & Bloom 1995, Moon & Illingworth, 2004) 8
- 9. Personality, contd. • Conscientiousness – Self-control, organization, planning, compulsivity (Costa & McCrae, 1992) – Conscientiousness predicts procrastination (Johnson & Bloom, 1995), and in a meta- analysis, shows a moderately strong relationship with procrastination across many studies (r = - .63; van Eerde, 2003). – However, the pattern of procrastination does not appear to vary across the semester on any personality characteristic (Moon & Illingworth, 2004) 9
- 10. Biology • Eveningness – Directly predicts procrastination, but more directly predicts neuroticism (Hess, Sherman, & Goodman, 2000). – This appears to be true only in self-report. Using behavioral journals, evening preference does not appear to be related to procrastination (Ferrari, Harriott, Evans, Lecik-Michna, & Wenger, 1997). 10
- 11. Biology, contd. • Gender – Men are generally higher than women in procrastination. This appears to be true across cultures and nationalities (Klassen & Kuzucu, 2009; Ozer, Demir, & Ferrari, 2009; Owen & Newbegin, 2000; Prohaska, Morrill, Atiles, & Perez, 2000). 11
- 12. Coping Mechanism • Self-Handicapping – A coping mechanism where a person sets up obstacles to cause failure to be attributed to external causes rather than internal causes (Strube, 1986). – Many students cite fear of failure as a reason for procrastination (Schraw, Wadkins, & Olafson, 2007). – Self-handicapping seems to have one of the strongest relationships in a meta-analysis to procrastination of the variables examined (van Eerde, 2003). – Test scores seem to mediate the relationship between test scores and procrastination (Beck, Koons, & Milgrim, 2000) 12
- 13. Coping Mechanism, contd. • Avoidant Coping – Instead of shifting attribution for failure, the avoidant coping mechanism uses procrastination to avoid the anxiety that the assignment/situation produces altogether. – Achievement anxiety is related to procrastination (Carden, Bryant, & Moss, 2004), and reading ability is negatively associated with procrastination (Collins, Onwuegbuzie, & Jiao, 2008). – Increased anxiety is also associated with an increase in procrastination (Fritsche, Young, & Hickson, 2003; Owens & Newbegin, 1997). – Avoidant coping is also directly predictive of procrastination (Alexander, & Newbegin, 2007; Burns, Dittmann, Nguyen, & Mitchelson, 2000; Deniz, Tras, & Aydogan, 2009) 13
- 14. Self-Regulation • This views procrastination as a result of the inability of the student to regulate his/her own behavior, so that tasks fall by the wayside. • Those high in procrastination tend to have more difficulty with self-regulation, in general (Brownlow & Reasinger, 2000), accounting for about 25% of the variance in procrastination in one sample (Senecal, Koestner, & Vallerand, 1995). • Self-efficacy for self-regulation is more often researched, however. There is a strong relationship between this construct and procrastination (Klassen, Ang, Chong, Krawchuck, Huan, Wong, & Yeo, 2009; Klassen, Krawchuck, Lynch, & Rajani, 2008). 14
- 15. Performance Enhancing • Another view is that procrastination can be used intentionally to place time pressure for the purpose of increasing arousal and performance (i.e. I work better under pressure). • Active procrastination is associated with better time management skills (Choi & Moran, 2009), and active procrastinators have higher self-efficacy and more intrinsic motivation than passive procrastinators (Chu & Choi, 2005). • Students also report using procrastination as a means of creating a state of flow in their work, and of helping to raise the quality of their work (Schraw, Wadkins, & Olafson, 2007) 15
- 16. Practice with Procrastination • The consequences in the classroom can be significant, especially when deadlines pass. But, what can be done? • Little research on practice exists. One reason may be the relative difficulty of practice research in comparison with correlational research. • More permissive and flexible course, particularly in terms of standards and deadlines, are reported by students as encouraging procrastination. Lower standards of performance and mastery are also reported as encouraging higher procrastination (Schraw, Wadkins, & Olafson, 2007) 16
- 17. Practice, contd. • In a small, prospective study, students from a technical college received a brief intervention from the instructor if they failed to turn the first assignment in on time, which significantly decreased future procrastination in the course as compared with a control group in similar classes with the same instructor (Strunk & Spencer, 2010). • Still, no clear guidelines exist for practice with procrastination in the classroom. This is an area for future research to provide better evidence based practice for educators to reduce procrastination (especially late-work) with students. 17