Collaborative Research: Identifying When and Why Students Procrastinate in Undergraduate STEM Courses: Toward Developing Personalized Interventions

This project focuses on academic procrastination, a common challenge that can negatively affect both student learning in STEM education courses as well as well-being. Academic procrastination occurs when students unnecessarily delay academic tasks, even when they know that the delay may lead to negative consequences. Research has linked procrastination to lower academic performance, as well as increased stress, anxiety, and other emotional difficulties. Despite its prevalence in STEM courses, there are few evidence-based programs that have been shown to effectively help students reduce procrastination and build more productive study habits. The goal of this project is to better understand the daily habits, experiences, and situations that contribute to STEM student procrastination, and to identify which strategies for overcoming it work best and under which circumstances. To do this, the project will ask students to respond to brief prompts on their own smartphones at multiple points throughout their day to capture real-time reports of when and why they procrastinate versus successfully engage in academic work. The findings will provide researchers and educators with a necessary foundation for developing more effective, personalized approaches to supporting student learning, academic achievement, and well-being. Academic procrastination, defined as a voluntary and unnecessary delay of action on academic tasks despite the possibility of ending up worse off because of that delay, is a highly prevalent and impactful but neglected problem that affects student learning in STEM and well-being. This project addresses two important gaps in current efforts to reduce procrastination in undergraduate STEM courses. First, procrastination is often viewed as a stable personal tendency, even though it varies considerably across situations. Factors such as the type of task, a student's mood, or their environment may influence when and why procrastination occurs, but such situational influences have received relatively little attention in previous research. Study 1 will address this gap by identifying situational factors (e.g., presence of distractors) and psychological states (e.g., mood) that commonly serve as triggers of procrastination. Second, personalized support is effective but difficult to scale for large student populations, and large-scale programs typically deliver the same guidance to all students, which may overlook individual needs because students procrastinate for different reasons. Study 2 will address this gap by examining which procrastination-reducing strategies work for which students and under what circumstances. Together, these studies will provide the first systematic and rigorous investigation of personalized intervention techniques targeting academic procrastination in STEM courses. This project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program and NSF's IUSE: EDU Program. The IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.