Abstract
College students’ procrastination patterns and strategies to decrease procrastination were investigated. Each week, participants alternated between two schedules of delivery of practice quizzes while preparing for weekly quizzes. In Study 1, one practice quiz was available per day in the noncontingent condition. In the contingent condition, participants had to submit one practice quiz per day to access the subsequent practice quiz. In Study 2, two practice quizzes were available every other day in the noncontingent condition. In the contingent condition, participants had to submit two practice quizzes every other day to access subsequent practice quizzes. Six of 25 participants stopped procrastinating at the end of the contingent condition. Both conditions yielded high scores on weekly quizzes even when participants procrastinated. These results indicate that college students’ procrastination patterns can be changed, although it does not necessarily lead to increased quiz scores.
Highlights
Self-regulation has been defined as the extent to which a person can change their behavior (Muraven et al, 1999)
Participants exhibited similar percentages of correct answers in both conditions. These results indicate that both schedules of practice quizzes can yield high scores on weekly quizzes
Six participants across both studies changed their procrastination patterns at the end of the contingent condition, which means that they started submitting practice quizzes at the beginning of the week and worked on a regular basis according to the contingent schedule in place
Summary
Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory behavior analysis course were invited to participate in the study by allowing the researcher to collect data about their performance in the course. Participants were informed that an instructional component of the course was to be evaluated. They were not informed about the dependent and independent variables. Participants accessed the practice and weekly quizzes using Blackboard, an online instructional management platform. Questions in Blackboard were scored automatically by the platform as correct or incorrect and the scores, as well as the questions and student’ answers, appeared on the screen after the quiz was submitted. Questions were divided into three types of quizzes: the pretest, optional practice quizzes, and weekly quizzes. The pretest and weekly quiz questions were identical. Optional practice quiz questions covered the same topics as the pretest and weekly quiz questions, but they were reworded or had different answer alternatives
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