Probe Into Academic Procrastination Of University Students

Academic procrastination refers to the behavior tendency that students betray their primary learning intention, and unnecessarily postpone executing learning tasks that they intend to do. Generally this behavior tendency leads to unqualified learning outcomes, tortured academic procrastinators with emotional problems. Dating from 1980s, psychologists in Western world have begun to inquiring into this topic, and have accumulated substantial research results. They have reached agreements on how to define academic procrastination, developed different kinds of academic procrastination measurement tools, brought forward several kinds of theories to explain why people procrastinate. Academic procrastination researches in foreign countries mainly concerned university students. They investigated how many college students always delay doing learning activities, how many college students bother with academic procrastination, and how many college students want to decrease their procrastination tendency eagerly. They explored the relationships between academic procrastination and many other correlative psychological variables. They tried to find out efficient methods to cure academic procrastination. Two typical academic procrastination research paradigms are scale testing and procrastination daily logs. At present, there is no empirical academic procrastination study existing in domestic psychological research, except several reviews about foreign procrastination researches that have been published.The present research mainly intends to reach two goals: Firstly, reveals basic features of university students' academic procrastination in China, including procrastination frequencies and the reasons why students procrastinate. Secondly, explores how autonomy or self-determined study motivation influences academic procrastination. The researcher tries to combine two methods to inquire into the two problems just introduced. They are scale testing and procrastination daily logs.The results indicate that: There are about 20% university students always unnecessarily delay doing learning activities, about 25% university students get in trouble with academic procrastination, about 45% university students want to decrease their procrastination behaviors; The main reasons for university students procrastination are as follows: aversiveness of task, peer pressure, self-control deficit, irrational thinking, lack of intrinsic study motivation, adaptive adjusting of academic arrangements, reinforcement from past lucky procrastination experiences, risk taking and dependency; The self-determination degree of study motivation influenced academic procrastination. The study motivation more self-determined, the university students procrastinated less, the study motivation less self-determined, the university students procrastinated more.