Toward a Holistic Approach to Reducing Academic Procrastination with Classroom Interventions

Abstract

Academic procrastination is prevalent and a promising target for intervention in educational contexts. Nevertheless, few interventions for procrastination have been rigorously tested. We propose a novel TORCHeS (Theory-driven, Open, Rigorous, Collaborative, Holistic, Small-changes) approach to developing easily implementable and potentially effective classroom interventions for academic procrastination. TORCHeS is motivated by a belief that complex behaviors like academic procrastination require a holistic, multipronged intervention approach, and that intervention research must embrace collaborative, open-science practices and objective measures of procrastination behavior. We illustrate what TORCHeS-inspired intervention efforts may look like by deriving some “small-teaching” intervention techniques from a simple process model of self-control, which characterizes procrastination as a goal-management failure resulting from a need to repair negative emotion triggered by impending academic tasks.

Past Negative Consequences of Unnecessary Delay as a Marker of Procrastination

“…The NCP scale may be helpful in research as well as applied purposes. Self-report scales are often criticized, with behavioral procrastination measures ( Miyake and Kane, 2021 ) or momentary assessment of procrastination in experience sampling ( Wieland et al, 2018 ) suggested as better alternatives. However, the present results indicate an important advantage of self-report measures of procrastination over behavioral measures in that they, in a unique way, address the subjective criteria for problematic and irrational delays as distinct from delays that are unproblematic (e.g., Krause and Freund, 2014 ).…”

The ABC of academic procrastination: Functional analysis of a detrimental habit

“…Unfortunately, separating procrastinatory behavioral delays from other forms of behavioral delays has proven complicated. In the absence of suitable criteria, researchers have often resorted to behavioral delay in general as a proxy for behavioral procrastination (e.g., Miyake and Kane, 2021 ; Vangsness et al, 2022 ). Even self-report scales measuring procrastination struggle to separate rational delays from suboptimal or irrational delays (e.g., Svartdal and Steel, 2017 ; Svartdal and Nemtcan, 2022 ), resulting in scale scores that include non-procrastinatory delays and thus compromise their validity.…”