Research On Issues Related To Academic Procrastination Among Chinese Graduate Students

Academic procrastination refers to postpone or delay academic tasks needlessly during which students will experience psychological discomfort. It is a common phenomenon in the graduate group. Students who delay academic tasks spend less time and energy in learning and research, and can’t start or complete the required academic tasks on time. Academic procrastination not only have a negative impact on physical and mental health of students, but also result in anomie actions, which will decline their mastery of knowledge and ability, affect the quality of talents training, and have negative consequences on school, community as well as the country. In view of this, to learn the current situation of academic procrastination among graduate students and to investigate factors leading to this undesirable phenomenon is significant for improving the quality of talents training, formulating pertinent interventions as well as reducing the academic procrastination effectively.At present, the lack of effective assessment tools on graduate students’ academic procrastination hider the conduct of research in this field to a certain degree. To solve this problem, the study constructs Questionnaire of graduate students’academic procrastination firstly and test its reliability and validity. Secondly, this study uses the Questionnaire of graduate students’academic procrastination as assessment tool to investigate the level and features of academic procrastination among graduate students. Finally, the study makes a thorough inquiry on the relationship among conscientiousness, time control as well as academic procrastination, especially the mediating role-time control-between conscientiousness and academic procrastination. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) 《The Questionnaire of graduate students’academic procrastination》 contains two parts. The first section is designed to measure the degree of graduate academic procrastination, its coefficient of internal consistency is 0.806, with the correlation coefficients between 《General Procrastination Scale》 and《The Questionnaire of graduate students’ academic procrastination)) is 0.487 (P<0.001); The second part focuses on exploring the causes of academic procrastination, includes 28 items which divide into seven dimensions-"sensation seeking," "bad cognition", "features of the mission," "self-management", "lack of confidence", "external support" as well as "role conflict", explaining 69.00% variance of the academic procrastination. Its coefficient of internal consistency is 0.857.A11 these mean that 《The Questionnaire of graduate students’academic procrastination)) meets psychometric standards.(2) About eighty percentages of subjects report that they once experienced varying degrees of academic procrastination. Faced with different task situations, individual academic procrastination varies. To academic tasks with higher self-learning capacity and less supervision during the implementation process, students show more procrastination; while students show less procrastination on those tasks which they choose voluntarily and know the deadline clearly. This result can be explained by the grades and the task characteristics commonly. Though both internal and external factors can lead to academic procrastination, compared with the external ones, the internal ones play a larger role.Individual with different characteristics of human populations show some differences on the degree of graduate academic procrastination and the causes of academic procrastination. To put it in detail, on the degree of graduate academic procrastination:① the score of academic procrastination rises steadily from the first year to the third year of graduate school, graduate students in grade one scored significantly lower than other grades. ② Compared with science graduates and arts graduates, students studying engineering get the lowest scores. Though arts graduates score higher than science graduates, the difference does not achieve significant level. On the causes of academic procrastination, the scores of" cognition ", "lack of confidence" and "external support" exit significant gender and disciplinary differences:Male students agree more than female students on the opinion-"bad cognition will cause academic procrastination";graduate students in grade three score higher than graduate students in grade one on "lack of confidence will cause academic procrastination"; To the view of "external support will cause academic procrastination", engineering students get the highest score than other subjects, but the difference between science graduates and arts graduates is not significant.(3) The relationship among conscientiousness, time monitoring as well as academic procrastination is pairwise correlation significantly. Time monitoring exerts partly mediating effects between conscientiousness and academic procrastination explaining 33.77% of the total effect."Sense of competence", "achievement motivated" and "self-regulation" have a significant negative effect prediction on academic procrastination, explaining 24.60% variance of the academic procrastination commonly. "Time allocation" and "plan" have a significant negative effect prediction on academic procrastination, explaining 23.60% variance of the academic procrastination commonly.