Academic procrastination in college students: The role of self-reported executive function Procrastination is the intentional delay of due tasks. The term is a known phenomenon in a college setting so I decided it would be beneficial to examine an experiment that evaluated how procrastination hurts different aspects of a college student’s life. The experiment I found was by Laura A. Rabin, Joshua Fogel and Katherine E. Nutter- Upham and they hypothesized that procrastination can negatively impact learning, achievement, academic self-efficiency and quality of life and that understanding the factors that produce and maintain this behavior will improve things overall. In the experiment, 212 college students age 30 and below were asked to fill out a 20-item questionnaire that examines behavior tendencies to delay the start of completion of everyday tasks. They rate various statements on a five point scale (1 = extremely uncharacteristic; 5 = extremely characteristic). An example of this would be “I often find myself performing tasks that I had intended to do days before” or “I usually start an assignment shortly after it is assigned.” After doing that, participants rated the frequency of 75 problematic behaviors over the past month on a three point scale (1 = never; 2 = sometimes; 3 = often). A higher score indicated a greater degree of executive dysfunction. Then finally they filled out something that measured their behavioral regulation or the ability to not act on an impulse. Statistics from all these were then calculated for all variables. For one, the continuous variable of academic procrastination was used as the outcome variable. Linear regression analysis was used to determine the variables associated with that outcome. Two models were conducted as well. The first consisted of the independent variables of demographics like sex, age, race, ethnicity, etc. The second model consisted of independent variables of those in the first plus the participants “estimated IQ, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, NEO-Neuroticism, and NEO-Conscientiousness.” As a result, they found that executive functioning were significantly associated with increasing academic procrastination in a model that included personal and medical demographic characteristics. It was also discovered that increasing age showed a significant trend level of a higher percentage of procrastination. These finding showed” the importance of various aspects of self-reported executive functions in predicting a tendency toward academic procrastination in college students.” The second model which was the demographics and psychological variables, it was concluded that individuals with initiation problems typically want to succeed but have difficulty getting started and may require extensive prompts or cues to begin an activity. That those with planning and organization difficulties may “fail to begin academic tasks in a timely fashion or fail to function efficiently because they do not have required objects or materials available when they finally sit down to work.” It is not surprising that planning and good organization skills were predictive of academic procrastination . The results make us see that it is important that working with students to improve these abilities will help procrastination go down. Setting effective goals for students will aid in this greatly.

Reference/Citation
Rabin, L., Fogel, J., & Nutter-Upham, K. (2011). Academic procrastination in college students: The role of self-reported executive function. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 33(3), 344-357.