Longitudinal Examination of Procrastination and Anxiety, and Their Relation to Self-Efficacy for Self- Regulated Learning: Latent Growth Curve Modeling

Abstract

Life in school and university is burdened with deadlines and seemingly endless amounts of work. Students must cope with stressful timeframes and manage their academic anxiety (Misra & McKean, 2000). Ironically, one of the greatest challenges in the academic realm is not the quantity of assignments but the tendency of students to delay the process of working towards their goals. By this logic, it is not necessarily the difficulty of the work that students struggle with but instead their ability to selfregulate, stay on track, and complete their work. Procrastination has been defined as a failure to self-regulate to achieve intended goals, which results in a time delay (Steel, 2007). Procrastination has been seen as a universal phenomenon that hinders people's ability for accomplishing their goals (Steel, 2007). Academic procrastination specifically looks at the delay and postponing of academic tasks (Sirin, 2011). According to Yong (2010), academic procrastination is irrational tendency to delay at the beginning or completion of an academic (p. 63). Indeed, many students do not have sufficient drive to start their academic work, even when they intend to complete it by the deadline. Academic procrastination has been seen to relate to students missing deadlines, delaying studying, lower grades, and even withdrawing from courses (Beswick, Rothblum, & Mann, 1988). The prevalence rates for academic procrastination at the university level are high, and countering procrastination is considered to be one of the most important factors to student success (Steel, 2007). It is estimated that 80% to 95% of students at the university or college level suffer from academic procrastination (Ellis & Knuas, 1977). Others estimate 30% to 50% of students reporting that they have troubles with primary tasks such as writing a term paper, preparing for exams, and doing weekly readings (Clark & Hill, 1994; Solomon & Rothblum, 1984). In a large-scale sample, Steel and Ferrari (2013) found that procrastination was associated with lower education levels, showing the importance of self-regulation skills in achieving higher education goals. Solomon and Rothblum (1984) stated that the primary reasons that college students procrastinate is related to task aversiveness, fear of failure, evaluation anxiety, low self-confidence, perfectionistic standards for success, and difficulty in decision making.The Link between Anxiety and ProcrastinationAnxiety is defined as emotion based on the appraisal of threat, an appraisal which entails symbolic, anticipatory, and uncertain elements (Lazarus & Averill, 1972, p. 487). Anxiety is closely related to a fear of future harm or potential future threats (Reiss, 1991). Prior studies have shown that anxiety can have a debilitating effect on academic performance (Macher, Paechter, Papousek, & Ruggeri, 2012). In an earlier study of anxiety relating to procrastination, Lay (1989) found that state anxiety was associated with perceptions of threat, harm, and emotion-focused coping. It has been found that in graduate students academic procrastination is significantly and positively related to anxiety, with a majority of it related to tasks such as writing, studying, and weekly readings (Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Onwuegbuzie & Jiao, 2000). Rothblum, Solomon, and Murakami (1986) stated that academic procrastination usually included a problematic level of anxiety. Although most studies found positive correlations between academic procrastination and academic anxiety, these studies do not emphasize a causal relationship (Onwuegbuzie, 2000). That is, the cross-sectional correlational analyses from these studies reveal that there is a positive and significant relationship between procrastination and the interpretation of anxiety, including test and class anxiety. Therefore, anxiety and procrastination have-for the most part-been measured at single time points, revealing only these relations within a narrow temporal time point. …