Are Decision-Making Styles, Locus of Control, and Average Grades in Exams Correlated with Procrastination in University Students?

Elisabetta Sagone,Maria Luisa Indiana

doi:10.3390/educsci11060300

Abstract

In this paper decision-making styles, locus of control, and average grades in exams are examined as correlates of procrastination in a sample of 185 university students (mainly female students) recruited from mandatory courses for degrees in psychology and pedagogy at the University of Catania (Italy). Method: We used the Decisional Procrastination Scale (Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995), consisting of five Likert-type items useful for analyzing the procrastination; the Decision-Making Styles (Di Nuovo & Magnano, 2013), chosen for measuring the doubtfulness, delay, proxy, and no problem styles with 15 Likert-type items; the Locus of Control of Behavior Scale (Craig, Franklin, & Andrews, 1984) used to evaluate internal and external loci of control. The data were gathered through an online anonymous questionnaire and were analyzed using the multiple linear regression model to assess how styles of decision-making, locus of control, and average grades in exams affect the decision to procrastinate in university students. The main findings of this study indicate that doubtfulness and delay decision-making styles correlate with high decisional procrastination together with low average grades at university exams. Locus of control is excluded by the proposed model. Conclusions: These findings suggest pursuing a deeper investigation of the various types of procrastination and the measures used for analyzing the academic achievement in university students.

Highlights

Procrastinating behavior is considered the avoidable delay of activities or actions that people have in mind to complete, which when performed tend to create an emotional discomfort [1]; it is viewed as the postponing of tasks due to a lack of promptness in both intention and behavior [2] and a “voluntary delay [of] an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off after the delay” [3] (p. 66)
Descriptive analyses indicated that university students showed low levels of decisional procrastination and mainly tended to use an adaptive and useful decisional style based on no problem, contrary to proxy, which was rarely adopted by this sample
The statistical analysis carried out with linear correlations using Pearson’s coefficient showed significant and positive relationships between decisional procrastination and doubtfulness, delay, and proxy (Table 2), suggesting that the more the university students tended to procrastinate in their decisions, the more they were prone to adop a dysfunctional decision-making style, exhibiting overall doubtfulness and delay, and weakly proxy

Summary

Introduction

Procrastinating behavior is considered the avoidable delay of activities or actions that people have in mind to complete, which when performed tend to create an emotional discomfort [1]; it is viewed as the postponing of tasks due to a lack of promptness in both intention and behavior [2] and a “voluntary delay [of] an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off after the delay” [3] (p. 66). Several researchers examined the degrees of academic procrastination among university students, revealing that 70% of students procrastinate regularly and that 50% of students who procrastinate do it consistently and problematically [5,6]. They are aware that procrastinating behavior is wrong and harmful, but only a small number of them are able to overcome this behavioral tendency, even if 95% of procrastinators wish to reduce this tendency. The more the students tend to procrastinate, the more often will their grades below This last relation can be mediated by academic life satisfaction and rational beliefs about studying [26]

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