Understanding procrastination: A case of a study skills course

Abstract

Procrastination is consistently viewed as problematic to academic success and students’ general well-being. There are prevailing questions regarding the underlying and maintaining mechanisms of procrastination which are yet to be learnt. The aim of the present study was to combine different ways to explain procrastination and explore how students’ time and effort management skills, psychological flexibility and academic self-efficacy are connected to procrastination as they have been commonly addressed separately in previous studies. The data were collected from 135 students who participated in a voluntary time management and well-being course in autumn 2019. The results showed that students’ ability to organize their time and effort has the strongest association with procrastination out of the variables included in the study. Psychological flexibility also has a strong individual role in explaining procrastination along with time and effort management skills. Surprisingly, academic self-efficacy did not have a direct association with procrastination. Interestingly, our findings further suggest that time and effort management and psychological flexibility are closely related and appear to go hand in hand and, thus, both need to be considered when the aim is to reduce procrastination. The implications of the findings are further discussed.

Effect of Personal and Contextual Factors of Regulation on Academic Achievement during Adolescence: The Role of Gender and Age

“…As predicted on Hypothesis 2, self-regulation is associated and positively predicts self-efficacy and achievement, contrary to procrastination. These results have been widely evidenced in college students [37,61,[91][92][93][94] and are also present in high school students. For that reason, due to the recent rise in virtual education for primary and high school students, it is essential to guide students to plan adequate knowledge acquisition goals and strategies of self-learning [95].…”

“…That way, those who possess self-regulation and control skills choose adequate behavioral adjustment strategies, self-control the development of their working schedule looking to respond appropriately to their tasks to improve their performance [8,30]. The self-regulation general variable is present in the promotion of motivational-affective strategies [28,29]; the type of assumed learning scope [31][32][33]; achievement emotions [34,35]; coping strategies [36]; academic confidence and procrastination [37]. Contrary to selfregulation, when a dys-regulatory behavior as procrastination is present [26,27], people decide to postpone actions regardless of their adverse effects, increasing the perceived stress level, affecting important adjustment behaviors.…”

Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of Academic Procrastination

“…Academic procrastination is considered problematic to academic success and a self-regulated failure among university students (Zhang et al, 2018 ; Hailikari et al, 2021 ). It is necessary to study the trend of academic procrastination comprehensively to manage to reduce it.…”

Promoting university students’ well-being and studying with an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)-based intervention

“…It has been shown that psychological flexibility has a strong relationship to progression in studying (Asikainen, 2018;Asikainen et al, 2018) and a negative relationship to problems in studying (Levin et al, 2018) and procrastination (Glick et al, 2014). In addition, psychological flexibility together with organized studying have also been found to be negatively related to procrastination (Hailikari et al, 2021), and thus, by combining these two in this course may have influenced students' experiences of more motivating and more efficient studying as the students reflected in their journals. Based on the reflections of the students, we suggest that supporting both psychological flexibility and study skills can have positive effects on students' well-being and study skills.…”