The Impact of Procrastination on Engineering Students' Academic Performance

摘要

The goal of this study is to model the relationships among four variables early activity, time pressure reactivity, underlying performance, and class performance. The specific research questions are: Does procrastination mediate the relationship between earliness and academic performance? Do gender differences affect procrastination and academic performance? This study identifies a set of relationships among four variables using structural equation models. Each variable in the model is rooted in objective measurements through course website datasets and parametric empirical Bayes estimation obtained from 59 undergraduate engineering students. We found that the degree of procrastination, termed time-pressure reactivity in this model, mediates the relationship between early activity and academic performance. We also found significant gender differences among the four variables: female students showed earlier activity and less procrastination, as well as greater academic performance, than male students. In practice, our findings suggest that the measurement of students' time logged on to access course website material can help researchers to estimate students' short-term and long-term academic performance, as mediated through the individualized degree of procrastination.