The Study On The Current Situation And Causes Of Primary Students’ Academic Procrastination

Academic procrastination is a delayed tendency in the learning situation, which is definedas a delay of the learning tasks within the stipulated time, although students have the intentionto accomplish them. Or it means that students complete the learning tasks at the last time, butthey postpone the tasks’ starting time and experience the uncomfortable emotion. Academicprocrastination not only results in the delay of the learning tasks and the decline of academicperformance, but also has an negative influence on the emotion, physical and mental health. Theresearch focused on the following three aspects to discuss primary students’ academicprocrastination:First, the author translated and revised General Procrastination Scale that was drawn up byLay in1984to make it be more suitable for Chinese primary students. Then the author used it toinvestigate the current situation of primary students’ academic procrastination.Second, the researcher made use of the interview to study primary students’ procrastinationin certain learning situation, which subject did students most probably generate procrastination,the reasons of academic procrastination.Third, the researcher explored the influences of difficult learning tasks and dislike learningtasks on primary students’ academic procrastination with the methods of questionnaire andexperiment.The study makes the following six conclusions:(1) Academic procrastination is relatively common for primary students. But moststudents’ degree of procrastination is not serious, only a few students have the serious degree ofacademic procrastination.(2)There are significant differences of primary students’ academic procrastination indifferent sexes and grades. Male students show higher degree of academic procrastination thanfemale students. Grade Four and Grade Five show higher degree of academic procrastinationthan Grade Six. Grade Four and Grade Five, resident students and nonresident students show nodifferences in academic procrastination.(3)Primary students show the highest degree of academic procrastination in Chinesediscipline. The procrastination mainly shows up in coursework, including writing compositions,doing the reading comprehensions, coping tasks and recitations.(4)The dominating causes of primary students’ academic procrastination are learning tasksare more difficult and disgusting. (5)The procrastinators and non-procrastinators show no differences in simple learningtasks. However, they show significant differences in difficult learning tasks. The procrastinatorstend to choose the difficult-simple sequence, they take difficult learning tasks first, and thentake simple tasks. On the contrary, non-procrastinators are inclined to choose thesimple-difficult sequence.(6)The interests that primary students show in learning tasks have an impact in tasks’finishing time. Primary students show less academic procrastination in favorite tasks than in thedisgusting tasks.