Procrastination and Learning Disabilities

I'm not particularly interested in learning disabilities, but I do care about diverse learning styles in the classroom. For my purposes, the label LD tends to obscure that diversity, so I didn't find "Procrastination and Motivation of Undergraduates with Learning Disabilities: A Mixed-Methods Inquiry" all that useful.

Students with LD were more likely than others to procrastinate (144). The researchers found that self-efficacy is differently related to students with learning disabilities than those without. (Self-efficacy is how good you think you are at something.) Apparently non-learning disabled students were less likely to procrastinate, the more self-efficacy they had with the task (144). But LD students have comparatively inflated self-efficacy (145). Compared to those not considered learning disabled, those with LD are more likely to think or claim they can handle academic tasks they aren't so great at. Perhaps because of this, self-efficacy isn't closely related to procrastination in students with LD.

One more thing, the researchers note in their literature review that procrastination is still less studied than other parts of psychology. In their review of PsychINFO in 2006, they "found 11,374 articles on self-efficacy, 4,056 articles on self-regulation, and only 422 articles with procrastination as a key word" (138). So while I'm personally impressed with the amount of studies on procrastination in psychology, especially in the past couple of years, there's still a lot of room in the field. It's pretty much under-studied across the board.

Work Cited

Klassen, Robert M., Lindsey L. Krawchuck, Shane L. Lynch, and Sukaina Rajani. "Procrastination and Motivation of Undergraduates with Learning Disabilities: A Mixed-Methods Inquiry." Learning Disabilites Research and Practice 23.3 (2008): 137-147.