Abstract
Background: Academic procrastination (AP) has been a common problematic behavior in college students. While physical activity (PA) has been reported to increase self-efficacy and reduce AP, less is known about the potential relationships among them. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the mediating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between PA and AP. Methods: 687 Chinese college students (51% males, 49% females) aged 17–23 years (M = 19.59, SD = 0.89) participated in the study. PA, self-efficacy, and AP were assessed using the Physical Activity Rating Scale-3 (PARS-3), the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students (PASS), respectively. Pearson correlation analysis, linear regression analysis, and mediation analysis were used to analyze the data. Results: (1) PA has a significant and negative impact on college students’ AP, (2) PA has a significant and positive impact on college students’ self-efficacy; (3) self-efficacy has a significant and negative impact on AP in college students; and (4) self-efficacy significantly mediates the relationship between PA and AP. Conclusions: PA is an effective intervention for directly and indirectly decreasing college students’ AP. Therefore, more intervention efforts should focus on the promotion of PA in higher education to improve students’ self-efficacy and thus, to reduce AP among college students.
Highlights
Academic procrastination (AP) is an intended action to postpone or delay the completion of timely academic activities unnecessarily [1,2,3,4] and is highly prevalent among college students [1,3,5,6]
Since we proposed that Physical activity (PA) has a negative impact on AP, and the positive relationship between self-efficacy and AP is supported through the literature and our derived logic, we proposed the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 4 (H4)
√ the average variance extracted (AVE) values for each construct were above the 0.5 cut-off value (Table 1), and the AVE values for each construct were larger than the correlation between the factors (Table 2), indicating acceptable convergent validity and discriminant validity of the scale
Summary
Academic procrastination (AP) is an intended action to postpone or delay the completion of timely academic activities unnecessarily [1,2,3,4] and is highly prevalent among college students [1,3,5,6]. It is reported that over 70% of college students regularly postpone educational tasks such as readings and writing assignments [7,8]. Clear evidence shows that AP could lead to serious problems related to students’ studies, work, and quality of life (e.g., poor academic performance, negative mental health outcomes, and low levels of life satisfaction) [10,11,12,13,14]. Reducing students’ AP behaviors is deemed necessary and critical for achieving student success in higher education
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