Students' Epistemological Beliefs, Self-regulation Relations, Learning And Academic Delay

Academic procrastination is an ordinary phenomenon during the lives of students. It is a tendency for an individual often or nearly often to delay school tasks or to experience the anxiety concerned it. Epistemological belief, a newly developed topic in the domain of metacognition research, is a concept employed by psychologists when conducting epistemological studies psychologically. It is defined as the internal background for learners to perform learning activities. Self-regulation learning is the process of continuously planning, supervising, examining, evaluating and macro-controlling the ongoing learning activities in order to reach the scheduled target.At present, credit system is carried out at most universities. Because the student management at universities is less strict than that in high schools, the tendency of academic procrastination is more and more obvious when they entered the universities. The purpose of the paper is to depict the status quo of academic procrastination and to research on the relationships among epistemological belief, self-regulated learning and academic procrastination. Based on reviewing lots of literatures and synthesizing the research methods, home and abroad, questionnaire survey method of self-stating is adopted to measure 1300 registered college students among seven universities inChina. The conclusions obtained are as follows:1.Academic procrastination exists widely in nearly half of the university students and more than 10% are much more seriously.2. There are no significant differences in academic procrastination degree between boys and girls, but for girls the emotional disturbance is more serious and the desire to reduce it is higher. There are no gender difference in epistemological beliefs and self-regulated learning ability.3. Academic procrastination and self-regulated learning ability have no obvious specialty difference. But there exist significant specialty differences on epistemological beliefs. Compared with the students major in science and engineering, students major in literature and history have lower total marks of epistemological beliefs.4. The degree of academic procrastination is not the same in different grade. It showed that the procrastination degree of junior students is more serious than that of fresh students and senior students. The level of epistemological beliefs of fresh students are stronger than that of sophomore and junior students and the level of senior students are stronger than that of sophomore. The self-regulated learning ability of senior students is higher than that of sophomore and the junior students.5. There exists significant negative correlation between academic procrastination and epistemological belief, that is, the more sophisticated the epistemological belief, the lower degree the academic procrastination. While positive correlation is existed between epistemological belief and self-regulated learning ability, namely, the higher the enthusiasm, the stronger the self-regulated learning ability. There exists significant negative correlation between self-regulated learning ability and the all dimension of academic procrastination, that is, the stronger the self-regulated learning ability, the lower the degree of academic procrastination. It showed that self-regulation can predict 11.8% of the degree of academic procrastination, that is, there is certain prediction ability.