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Academic Procrastination among College Students

Do you know the greatest thief the world has ever produced? The greatest thief this world has ever produced is procrastination, and he is still at large. Notably, procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing something; this usually results in time wastage. This paper seeks to discuss Academic procrastination, which is the tendency to postpone intended academic tasks, even when doing so may have negative consequences.  Arguably, it remains a common phenomenon in academic environments, and it is viewed as a situational failure and a failure in learning self-regulation. Academic procrastination is associated with a range of negative effects. Some of the effects negative effects include failure to achieve academic goals. Also, Academic procrastination is linked to various personality and behavioral traits. On the other hand, Approaches to reducing academic procrastination found in the literature can be divided into three categories: therapeutic therapy, therapeutic prevention, and intervention by instructors or teachers.

First, Academic procrastination has a great impact on students’ academic success. Notably, academic procrastination can be induced by writing term papers, studying for exams, and keeping up with weekly reading assignments. Again, academic procrastination is also connected with missing assignment deadlines, delaying self-paced quizzes, claiming test anxiety, having low course marks, and achieving low cumulative grade point averages (Zacks & Hen, 2018). In essence, academic procrastination is a major contributor to poor academic performance among college students, especially among younger college students. This is due to the young college students’ maturity level and their unwillingness to accept and complete responsibility for their learning processes. Hence, they are most likely to practice academic procrastination compared to older students (Kim & Seo, 2015).

In addition, Academic procrastination is linked to various personality and behavioral traits (Moonaghi & Beydokhti, 2017).  Of the personality and behavioral traits contributing to the increase in academic procrastination are personal passion and interests. Arguably, passion is the overall eagerness or capacity to begin or complete things with enthusiasm. If the student lacks passion, there will be no strong motivation to complete their academic tasks in good time. In addition, lack of personal motivation or enthusiasm is a cause of procrastination. Generally, when students are passionate, they perform better academically. Another trait often associated with academic procrastination is laziness (Moonaghi & Beydokhti, 2017). Laziness is the tendency to avoid working when physical effort is required. According to Solomon and Rothblum’s research, evasion of labor and laziness account for eighteen percent of the reasons for procrastination. In addition, according to the Schraw study, over forty percent of students claimed they would fail the course if the instructor had high expectations or was not flexible in the deadline for assignment delivery.

To curb academic procrastination, learning institutions should provide therapeutic therapy, therapeutic prevention, and intervention by instructors or teachers (Zacks & Hen, 2018). First, Therapeutic treatment methods seek to intervene after a student has demonstrated procrastinatory behavior, such as late submission of the first course assignment. Second, therapeutic prevention methods aim to prevent the negative effects of procrastination from the start, such as therapeutic courses offered to students at the beginning of the semester. The third technique is to recruit the course teacher or instructor to provide nontherapeutic means of reducing procrastination among student participants.

To sum up, academic procrastination, which is directly related to personality and behavioral traits such as passion and laziness, remains a major contributor to poor academic performance among college students, especially young ones. Still, all is not lost since there are some practices that learning institutions can adopt as interventions to curb academic procrastination.

References

Karimi Moonaghi, H., & Baloochi Beydokhti, T. (2017). Academic procrastination and its characteristics: A Narrative Review. Future of medical education journal, 7(2), 43-50.

Kim, K. R., & Seo, E. H. (2015). The relationship between procrastination and academic performance: A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 82, 26-33.

Zacks, S., & Hen, M. (2018). Academic interventions for academic procrastination: A review of the literature. Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, 46(2), 117-130.