Presentation on academic procrastination given by Kamden Strunk in the Spring of 2011 at OSU-Tulsa.

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?
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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
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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)
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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)
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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).
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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).
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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)
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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)
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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).
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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)
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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.
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