Elsevier

Learning and Individual Differences

Volume 54, February 2017, Pages 160-172
Learning and Individual Differences

Academic procrastination and goal accomplishment: A combined experimental and individual differences investigation,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2017.01.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study tested two goal-related interventions: SMART goals and implementation intentions.

  • The study uniquely combined experimental and individual differences approaches.

  • Neither goal-related intervention significantly reduced academic procrastination.

  • Baseline academic procrastination, however, uniquely predicted achieving self-generated goals.

  • Believing in the malleability of procrastination was associated with greater procrastination.

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between academic procrastination and goal accomplishment in two novel ways. First, we experimentally tested whether undergraduate students (N = 177) could reduce their academic procrastination over a course of three weeks after performing goal-related exercises to set so-called SMART goals and/or to prepare those students with specific strategies to resist their temptations (forming implementation intentions). Second, we conducted systematic regression analyses to examine whether academic procrastination at baseline uniquely predicts later goal-related outcomes, controlling for various correlated variables, including personality traits (e.g., impulsivity), motivational factors (e.g., motivation for the generated goals), and situational factors (e.g., memory for the goals). Results indicated that neither the SMART-goal nor implementation-intention intervention significantly reduced academic procrastination in the three-week interval, even when relevant moderating variables were examined. Initial levels of academic procrastination, however, were predictive of the success of accomplishing the goals generated during the initial exercises, above and beyond a wide range of other candidate correlates. These results provided new correlational evidence for the association between academic procrastination and goal accomplishment, but suggest a need for further research to understand what interventions are effective at reducing academic procrastination.

Introduction

Academic procrastination—the voluntarily delay of action on academic tasks despite expecting to be worse off for that delay—is so pervasive that, according to some estimates, 50–80% of college students procrastinate moderately or severely (Day et al., 2000, Gallagher et al., 1992). Moreover, almost all students who procrastinate report the desire to reduce their procrastination (Gallagher et al., 1992). Such prevalence of academic procrastination suggests a need for systematic research that documents the extent to which procrastination negatively contributes to the achievement of students' academic goals and that explores potential ways to reduce procrastination.

A starting point for this study is some recent work that highlights goal-management abilities as an important factor for individual differences in procrastination. Recent theoretical accounts, for example, have suggested that various aspects of goal management, such as goal setting (Steel & König, 2006) and goal focus (Krause & Freund, 2014a), may influence procrastination. Some of these theoretical claims have also received support from a growing set of empirical studies (e.g., Blunt and Pychyl, 2000, Blunt and Pychyl, 2005, Gröpel and Steel, 2008, Gustavson et al., 2014, Gustavson et al., 2015, Krause and Freund, 2016).

Our own research has focused on specifying the cognitive and genetic influences underlying the association between procrastination and goal-management abilities. In large-scale twin studies (Gustavson et al., 2014, Gustavson et al., 2015), we have found, at the level of latent variables, a substantial correlation between procrastination and goal-management failures in everyday life (r = 0.67–0.76). Further, this association was primarily due to shared genetic influences, which also explained substantial variation in impulsivity (Gustavson et al., 2014) and executive functions (Gustavson et al., 2015), a set of higher-level cognitive abilities that support goal-directed behaviors and regulate one's thought and action (Friedman and Miyake, 2017, Miyake and Friedman, 2012). Such prior evidence for a common goal-management factor accounting for individual differences in procrastination, impulsivity, and executive functions have led us to conclude that procrastination and goal-management abilities are deeply intertwined.

Although it has become clear that goal management is an important contributing factor to procrastination, it is not clear whether helping students set and manage their goals can lead them to actually reduce their academic procrastination. Furthermore, self-report measures of procrastination have been shown to be correlated with academic achievement, such as course grades (e.g., Kim and Seo, 2015, Morris and Fritz, 2015), and with levels of success at fulfilling one's academic intensions, as measured with study time (Steel, Brothen, & Wambach, 2001) or the amount of reading assignments completed (Glick & Orsillo, 2015). However, little is known about whether academic procrastination is related to the achievement of academic goals generated by students themselves that more directly reflect their specific needs.

To make an initial step toward filling such gaps in the literature, we conducted a two-session laboratory study that combined experimental and individual differences approaches. In the first session, college students completed the initial baseline assessment of their academic procrastination and other related individual differences measures. They then completed two goal-related exercises that required them to create personal academic goals to be accomplished in the next few weeks and to identify anticipated temptations that might distract them from making progress on those goals. Specifically, students were assigned to one of four groups resulting from crossing two types of interventions (creating SMART goals and forming implementation intentions). They returned to the lab about three weeks later to provide postintervention measures of academic procrastination (how much they procrastinated since the initial session) and goal accomplishment (whether they accomplished those goals they had set).

Due to its high prevalence, many popular-press books have been written about procrastination (e.g., Burka and Yuen, 1983, Ferrari, 2010, Pychyl, 2013, Steel, 2010). Because delaying action on long-term goals in favor of short-term temptations is a central component of procrastination (Steel, 2007), these books highlight the importance of identifying specific goals to be accomplished, breaking these goals down into smaller subgoals, and following a time-defined schedule. Despite the sensibility of such advice, little research has directly tested the effectiveness of these goal-related strategies in reducing procrastination, academic or otherwise.

In fact, over two decades ago, Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown (1995) pointed out “an absence of double-blind attention-placebo trials […] necessary to establish demonstrated efficacy of a treatment” on reducing procrastination (p. 187). After summarizing preliminary results from some intervention studies that targeted altering students' misconceptions about academic procrastination (e.g., underestimation of task demands, overestimation of motivation and time left to complete task), Ferrari et al. (1995) stated that “our hope is that these clinically derived interventions can be eventually subjected to empirical testing” (p. 187).

Responding to this call, a small but growing number of studies published since have examined procrastination-related interventions (e.g., Rozental et al., 2015a, Rozental et al., 2015b). However, intervention studies that have targeted academic procrastination are still limited in number (e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002, Gieselmann and Pietrowsky, 2016, Toker and Avci, 2015, Tuckman, 1998, Tuckman and Schouwenburg, 2004). Moreover, although some intervention studies on academic procrastination have focused on cognitive behavioral strategies, such as identifying and challenging irrational thoughts (Ozer et al., 2013, Toker and Avci, 2015, Wang et al., 2015), only a few have targeted goal-management processes (Glick and Orsillo, 2015, Häfner et al., 2014).

In the Häfner et al. (2014) study, for example, 96 college students selected an important academic task to complete (e.g., writing a thesis) in the next 4 weeks and received 2 h of either (a) time-management training that targeted some goal-related processes (e.g., developing a strategy for achieving the goal, identifying the next steps to take) or (b) control training that involved simply discussing their own time-management problems. All participants were then asked to record the time they spent for their respective academic goals every day, and the records from those subjects who kept their time diaries for all four weeks were analyzed (n's = 22 and 23 in the experimental and control groups, respectively). Results indicated that subjects in the control group indeed spent more time working toward their goals in Week 4 than those in the experimental group. Importantly, however, the times the two groups spent on their goals in Weeks 1–3 did not differ, thus providing little evidence that the experimental group successfully reduced their procrastination by spending more time on their goals early on. In light of the small final sample sizes due to high drop-out rates (~ 50%), this study provides limited evidence for the positive influence of time-management training on academic procrastination.

More recently, Glick and Orsillo (2015) compared the effectiveness of two different procrastination interventions delivered online via a 20-min video to 117 college students: (a) an acceptance-based intervention that targeted mindfulness and emotion regulation (e.g., anxiety) and (b) a time-management intervention that more directly targeted goal-management skills, such as setting a schedule and preparing for last-minute obstacles. Although there was some evidence that the time-management intervention led to greater goal accomplishment (operationalized as the amount of reading assignments completed) than the acceptance-based intervention, there were no group differences in actual academic procrastination (operationalized as the actual/ideal ratio) after the interventions. There was, however, some evidence for the moderating influence of self-reported academic values, suggesting that the acceptance-based intervention was most effective for those students with high academic values.

Taken together with other intervention studies that similarly offered some promising but limited evidence (e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002, Ozer et al., 2013, Tuckman, 1998, Tuckman and Schouwenburg, 2004, Wang et al., 2015), these studies (Glick and Orsillo, 2015, Häfner et al., 2014) suggest that, although it may not be easy to reduce academic procrastination, interventions that target goal-related processes may help students achieve specific academic goals.

In this study, we tested the effectiveness of two goal-related interventions in reducing academic procrastination: creating SMART goals and forming implementation intentions. Although not extensively examined in the context of procrastination, these goal-related activities are often touted as effective ways to reduce the so-called intention–behavior gap, a fundamental problem underlying procrastination. Because, as noted shortly, these two interventions target different aspects of goal-management processes, we crossed them to test whether their positive influences, if any, would be additive or interactive.

The first intervention—creating SMART goals—targets the goal-setting process and involves clarifying what students want to achieve by developing concrete personal goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-defined (Bovend'Eerdt et al., 2009, O'Neill, 2000, Resnick, 2009).1 SMART goals are prominently featured in various self-help books and online sources, but little research has been conducted to test the effectiveness of creating SMART goals on reducing procrastination. Some component characteristics of SMART goals (i.e., specificity, measurability, and time-defined schedules), however, have been highlighted as important for goal accomplishment in popular-press books (Burka and Yuen, 1983, Ferrari, 2010, Grant Halvorson, 2010, Pychyl, 2013) and in long-held theoretical accounts of goal setting (Locke and Latham, 2002, Locke and Latham, 2006). We thus reasoned that asking students to create SMART goals would provide a good starting point for exploring whether goal-setting interventions could help reduce their academic procrastination.

The second intervention—forming implementation intentions—targeted a different aspect of goal management that requires the effective maintenance and retrieval of long-term goals: resisting temptations. Previous research has established impulsivity as a substantial correlate of procrastination (Ferrari, 1993, Steel, 2007), perhaps because impulsive individuals may be more likely to lose sight of their long-term goals by favoring short-term temptations (Gustavson et al., 2014). Thus, we reasoned that, in addition to setting good goals, it may also be important to prepare individuals for likely distracting temptations by providing specific strategies to combat them. A good candidate for such an intervention is implementation intentions, which involve forming if/then rules that can be targeted at specific temptations (Gollwitzer and Brandstatter, 1997, Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). Moreover, forming implementation intentions have been shown to be effective in reducing the intention–behavior gap in the domains of health psychology (for recent meta-analyses, see Adriaanse et al., 2011, Bélanger-Gravel et al., 2013).

Despite such promise, the existing evidence regarding potential benefits of implementation intentions for reducing procrastination is highly limited, especially when it comes to academic procrastination (e.g., Howell et al., 2006, Van Hooft et al., 2005). Moreover, the existing evidence for the relationship between implementation intentions and procrastination tends to be correlational in nature (with the exception of Owens, Bowman, & Dill, 2008), thus necessitating an experimental investigation that directly tests the effectiveness of implementation intentions in reducing academic procrastination.

The second aim of this study was to examine whether individual differences in academic procrastination uniquely predict the extent to which students successfully achieve their self-generated academic goals, above and beyond the influence of other relevant correlates. Much of research examining the association between academic procrastination and achievement has focused on global measures like course grades and has demonstrated that higher levels of self-reported procrastination are generally associated with lower grades (see Kim & Seo, 2015, for a recent meta-analysis). Although students clearly want to receive as high course grades as possible, such global measures cannot serve as a direct measure of their goal accomplishment.

Other work has focused on more specific and more direct indices of students' academic accomplishment, such as the amount of reading assignments completed (Glick & Orsillo, 2015) and the gap between intended and actual study hours (Steel et al., 2001). These studies have also produced some evidence for significant associations between academic procrastination and goal accomplishment, but, in these studies, the goals generated by the students were simple numerical values (e.g., intended study hours), rather than individually tailored descriptions of what they wanted to achieve (e.g., SMART goals). In fact, little research has examined how academic procrastination is related to the achievement of personal goals that students themselves generated in light of their own specific academic needs. Moreover, the existing evidence is limited as to whether this hypothesized association between academic procrastination and goal achievement is uniquely attributable to individual differences in procrastination per se, rather than other correlated factors (e.g., personality, motivation, and situational factors).

To address these issues, we asked subjects to report, in the second session, the extent to which they accomplished the goals they set in the first session and examined what specific individual differences variable(s) uniquely predicted self-reported goal achievement. We hypothesized that if procrastination is uniquely associated with the accomplishment of self-generated goals, this association should remain significant even after controlling for other potential correlates of procrastination. As a secondary question, we also examined what individual differences variable(s) would uniquely predict other outcome measures in this study, such as levels of success at resisting distracting temptations and postintervention levels of academic procrastination. To make the testing of our hypotheses rigorous, we included a wide range of candidate correlate variables, which we briefly summarize and justify below.

As for personality measures, we assessed trait levels of impulsivity, conscientiousness, and perfectionism because they are some of the most widely studied correlates of procrastination (Steel, 2007). They may also be relevant to goal accomplishment because impulsive individuals are more prone to give into their distracting temptations and avoid work (Gustavson et al., 2014, Pychyl, 2013), whereas conscientious individuals tend to be better organized and persevere until tasks are completed (Costa & McCrae, 1992). A component of perfectionism, known as personal standards (having high standards for oneself), has also been associated with less procrastination (Steel, 2007) and will likely be related to stronger goal accomplishment. In addition, we assessed subjects' everyday procrastination outside academic domains.

As a novel addition, we included a measure of mindset on procrastination—a growth versus fixed mindset for procrastination—to assess the extent to which one believes that procrastination is a malleable (rather than immutable) trait. When studied in the context of positive traits such as intelligence, a growth mindset has been associated with various positive outcomes (Dweck, 2006). For example, a recent meta-analysis (Burnette, O'Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, & Finkel, 2013) suggests that growth mindsets (e.g., of intelligence) predicts multiple self-regulatory behaviors, such as better goal setting, goal operating, and goal monitoring. We adapted the mindset questionnaire of intelligence for procrastination to examine whether one's belief about procrastination may be associated with levels of goal achievement and academic procrastination. This variable was potentially an important one to explore, because there was some suggestion that one's beliefs might moderate the effect of an intervention (e.g., Valentiner, Jencius, Jarek, Gier-Lonsway, & McGrath, 2013). For example, the benefit of intervention effects could be greater for those students who believe in the malleability of procrastination.

As for motivational factors, we included two trait-like aspects of motivation: (a) internal academic motivation—the drive to do well for oneself—which has been known to be negatively correlated with procrastination and (b) external academic motivation—the drive to do well to impress parents, teachers, or peers—which has been known to be positively correlated with procrastination (Senécal et al., 1995, Steel, 2007). We also assessed more specific aspects of motivation, including (a) motivation to achieve the specific academic goals generated during the intervention exercise and (b) confidence (or self-efficacy) for being able to achieve their self-generated goals.

Finally, we assessed subjects' memory for their self-generated goals, specifically, the extent to which subjects accurately remembered the specific goals and implementation intentions they had formed three weeks ago. We judged that this variable could be important for resisting short-term temptations and/or accomplishing self-generated goals, because individuals who cannot retrieve and maintain their goals when needed may have great difficulty completing them.

Although our selection of the variables is not exhaustive, the wide range of variables included in this study should help us better differentiate those variables that uniquely predict procrastination and goal accomplishment from those that are no longer unique predictors once controlling for other predictors.

We conducted a two-session intervention study that also included various individual differences measures. Our intervention procedure was modeled after the Personal Project Analysis approach (Little, 1983), in which subjects generate personal goals in an initial brainstorming session and then choose some of their most important goals (Blunt and Pychyl, 2000, Blunt and Pychyl, 2005). We supplemented this approach by introducing two different goal-related interventions after these initial goal-setting brainstorming exercises.

The procedure for this study is summarized in Fig. 1. In the first session, subjects completed measures of baseline academic procrastination, personality, motivation, and other situational factors. They then completed the goal-setting exercises in which they brainstormed multiple academic goals (9 total), chose the most important academic goals (3 total), and elaborated on the importance of accomplishing these goals. Half of the subjects also honed their goals into SMART goals. Afterward, they brainstormed and identified key temptations that they would likely encounter in the next three weeks, and half of the subjects additionally formed implementation intentions for these temptations. Finally, subjects completed motivation and confidence ratings for their personal academic goals.

In the second session, which occurred approximately three weeks later, subjects completed postintervention measures of academic procrastination. They were also assessed with their memory for the specific academic goals they had set earlier and reported whether they were able to accomplish those self-generated goals.

Our assessment of intervention-related changes in procrastination focused on 3 of 6 possible academic domains that each student chose as their most problematic areas (e.g., studying for exams, writing term papers), thereby maximizing the likelihood of observing reductions in procrastination due to the intervention. Subjects reported levels of their academic procrastination for the 3-week period prior to the intervention in the first session (baseline) and then for the 3-week period prior to the second session (postintervention). If the two interventions can help students reduce their academic procrastination, then the postintervention measures of academic procrastination should be significantly lower than their baseline counterparts, especially for the three academic domains targeted by the goal-setting exercises (Aim 1).

In addition, we collected a postintervention measure of goal accomplishment (how well they were able to achieve the goals they had set for themselves). If academic procrastination is a unique predictor of the actual accomplishment of self-generated goals, then the initial levels of academic procrastination should still be a significant predictor of goal accomplishment even after controlling for various candidate correlates included in the study (Aim 2). As a secondary question, we also explored what individual differences variables would significantly predict (a) the extent to which subjects were successful at resisting the specific temptations they had identified as potentially problematic and (b) postintervention levels of academic procrastination.

Section snippets

Subjects

The participants were 177 college students (110 women and 67 men) from an introductory psychology course who participated for course credit and completed both sessions. They were randomly assigned to the four between-subjects groups (n = 45 in the SMART-goal/implementation-intention group, 46 in the SMART-goal/temptations-only group, 39 in the control-goal/implementation-intention group, and 47 in the control-goal/temptations-only group). Thirteen additional subjects participated in both

Results

All analyses were conducted with ANOVA or multiple regression procedures using SPSS or R, with an alpha threshold of 0.05.

Discussion

The two aims of this study were (a) to provide an initial test of whether goal-related interventions (SMART goals and implementation intentions) could help students reduce their academic procrastination and (b) to examine whether baseline academic procrastination is uniquely predictive of success in achieving self-generated goals. The main results of the study were clear-cut for both aims. As for the first aim, there was no evidence that the SMART-goal or implementation-intentions intervention

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    This research was supported by Grants MH016880 and AG050595 from the National Institutes of Health and Grant DRL1252385 from the National Science Foundation.

    ☆☆

    The authors would like to thank Marjorie McIntire, Robert Eastwood, JoEllen Fresia, Wesley Tran, Emily Coyle, Joy Walters, Samantha Macchiaverna, Elizabeth Suhler, and Jane Baker for their assistance with data collection and coding.

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