It's not poor study habits that cause procrastination

Laura J. Solomon and Esther D. Rothblum (1984) conducted a study to see if procrastination was about more than merely poor study habits. Apparently this was a common belief among psychology researchers in the 80s. They figured there were plenty of possible reasons to procrastinate that hadn't been studied: "evaluation anxiety, difficulty in making decisions, rebellion against control, lack of assertion, fear of the consequences of success, perceived aversiveness of the task, and overly perfectionistic standards about competency" (503). In the end, they determined that major reasons for procrastination other than poor study habits/time management boiled down to fear of failure and task aversiveness. (You may recognize these terms from Onwuegbizie and Collins's article cited in my last post. Solomon and Rothblum designed the questionnaires Onwuegbizie and Collins used.)

This is really important because, as Solomon and Rothblum point out, if time management isn't the major cause, we might not want to act like it's the only solution. If our students are procrastinating because they're afraid we'll grade them harshly, maybe the more helpful thing to do would be to help them be more comfortable being evaluated. Review drafts without grading them. Avoid making ad hominem comments on papers (the dreaded "I expected more from you"). Don't put an undue amount of emphasis on a single assignment (break it up into mini-assignments if necessary). If our students are procrastinating because they don't like the actual act of writing, help get them comfortable. Lots of in-class writing. Talk to students about their ideas before having them turn things in. Have them talk to each other. Have them write informally. Use mini-assignments that can later be used as jumping off points for or even sections of larger papers.

As for which factor accounted for most of the procrastination, the answer is statistically complicated. A large group of students reported task aversiveness, but the small group of students who reported fear of failure often reported that as their only reason for procrastination. So both angles are important to tackle.

Work Cited

Solomon, Laura J., and Esther D. Rothblum. "Academic Procrastination: Frequency and Cognitive-Behavioral Correlates." Journal of Counseling Psychology 31.4 (1984): 503-509.

A Study about Procrastination in Writing!

I perked up pretty quickly at noticing an article had the both the words "writing" and "procrastination" in the title. What these authors (Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Kathleen M. T. Collins) have done is to administer a couple of questionnaires to a group of masters' students. One measured writing apprehension (which is what it sounds like, being apprehensive about writing); the other measured academic procrastination (procrastinating on school assignments).

According to Onwuegbizie and Collins, "these findings suggest that graduate students' apprehension about writing appears to be related to academic procrastination stemming from fear of failure and task aversiveness" (562). I'm skeptical about their use of "stemming from." Seems like a way to say "cause" without tripping the readers' mental alarms about confusing correlation and causation. In fact, Onwuegbizie and Collins go on to suggest that the situation feeds itself, that procrastination also causes fear of failure and task aversiveness...but they don't suggest any mechanism for that.

I'm not sure whether they mean that procrastination triggers guilt or other bad feelings which become associated with the task being avoided, or if they actually intend to suggest that procrastination causes bad writing, which reinforces the fear of failure. (The difference between fear of failure and task aversiveness is that fear of failure means you think you'll get a bad grade or harsh critique. Task aversiveness means you hate actually sitting down to write, even if you expect a good score.) I'm having trouble seeing another mechanism for reinforcing the fear of failure other than actually getting bad grades or something.

Now, this study is of grad students, where I'm studying undergrads. I skimmed an abstract today that suggested that level of education was not a major factor in amount of procrastination, but age was. Need to find that again.

Work Cited

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J., and Kathleen M. T. Collins. "Writing Apprehension and Academic Procrastination among Graduate Students." Perceptual and Motor Skills 92 (2001): 560-562.

Do we really think we're keeping students from procrastinating once they're out of our classes?

My thesis advisor asks if we writing teachers tend to assume procrastination is only an issue for our classes, not for classes other than writing. The implied answer seems to be yes, but it wasn't an implication I'd intended in my writing. It's not a question I'd ever thought about.

Isn't the whole point of having a required composition class that these writing skills are applicable across the curriculum? (It seems like that might also be the point of not having a required composition class, as was the case where I got my bachelor's.) We force students to take a writing class because we're going to teach them stuff they need for other classes, but stuff we figure they wouldn't actually learn in those other classes.

I think we know that students procrastinate in other classes, but maybe we think that our process models of writing are the key to preventing this. (I'm pretty sure we work under the assumption that procrastination should be prevented.) In theory, we hope our students will use the techniques they learned in the writing classroom in their other classes. I mean, this is what I told my students over and over again to justify to them why they had to take my class and why they had to write papers they thought were pointless. It's about learning these techniques which will serve as tools in the future.

It's a bit suspicious that I had to verbalize this belief so often. Was I trying to convince myself? Did I even believe my class was important? Did I secretly believe my students would learn to write better (as I had) when they had writing assignments that weren't merely exercises and attempts to teach techniques?

Maybe I was lucky to have some professors who were good at teaching writing, despite teaching classes that weren't necessarily writing classes.

I don't think most of us really believe that are students take away from our classes this great store of writing techniques and apply it to the rest of their classes. I think the most we hope for is to get them to think beyond the rigid rules they've picked up along the way and put more than five paragraphs in an essay.

I also think we're pretty moralistic about all this. I think we want to show our students how well things work when they don't procrastinate (because we require them to do in-class prewriting, submit drafts, revise based on peer review, and so on). I think we expect them to go right back to procrastinating in most cases, but now we can feel like we've taught them and they should know better. They deserve what they get now.

I don't mean this harshly. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that we care about procrastination because it is an easy way to judge students. They know they oughtn't to procrastinate, so when they do it, we can write them off.

Deadline number three

If I am correct, today is the day my thesis is due (again). It's not done.

I work 50+ hours a week with erratic hours. It's pretty much the norm for me to be up until 5 am Friday and then get up at that time on Sunday. Now there are still plenty of hours left in the week, even if some of them are devoted to my husband. I've not been working very hard on my thesis in the past few weeks.

I decided that today I would come to campus with my husband and go to the library to work. That always is more successful than thinking I'll work at home. I brought my data, my drafts, my calculator, everything I would need. I sat at a table and set to work. But mostly I stared at my papers and felt tired. I wondered what was going on at Burger King right now. I thought about whether I needed to talk to my boss about anything when I stopped by this afternoon to drop off a calendar of events and the deposit key.

Maybe somewhere noisy would be better?

Gregory Schraw, Theresa Wadkins, and Lori Olafson found that students mostly procrastinated because of other priorities. We instructors often get reminded that students have other classes. But topping the list of priorities was personal relationships. This reminds me of a time that I contacted a student about his excessive absences. He said he had to work, but that he knew school should be his top priority.

I didn't say this to him, but my thought was that school should be nowhere near his top priority. His health, psychological and physical, should be number one. Then personal relationships. Even supporting himself financially has to come before school. But none of that changed the fact that I would be grading him based on his performance in my class--it's a writing grade, not a leading-an-exemplary-life grade.

A few weeks ago, a writing center tutor asked me if I thought we should treat students differently based on why they didn't spend sufficient time on their papers. If they were working 40 hours a week, or had family problems, wasn't that a better excuse than partying too much? Or sitting around chilling instead of working?

I suppose it depends on what we meant by "treat differently." It would probably be a bad idea to have some all-purpose lecture about how if you sign up for a class, you have a duty to complete it to the best of your ability. So if I'm conferencing with students who are putting off writing for different reasons, obviously I should have different things to say to them.

But I took the tutor to be toying with the idea of grading more leniently on those with legitimate excuses. And that's just not my style. Either the paper is up to snuff or it's not.

Work Cited

Schraw, Gregory, Theresa Wadkins, and Lori Olafson. "Doing the Things We Do: A Grounded Theory of Academic Procastination." Journal of Educational Psychology 99.1 (2007): 12-25.

How Not to Write

Let's say that all else being equal, procrastination is a bad writing technique. Even if some people "get away with it," they'd have written better papers if they'd gotten started earlier and had more time for research, reflection, and revision.

I don't have evidence for this, but it's the kind of commonsense notion that I expect is hard to let go of without direct evidence against it. Or even then.

It's still not all that useful to tell students not to procrastinate. I mean, it doesn't hurt to give them an idea of how much time you expect them to spend on the assignment. If they've never had to write something they couldn't do in one sitting, they could benefit from a description of a different writing process that might work better. But if the main advice is "start this paper as soon as you get the assignment sheet," then what will the student do?

Those who actually take the advice will most likely use the same writing process they would have used at the last minute. They'll merely move up the timeframe. So instead of writing it all in one sitting the night before, they'll write it all in one sitting the night they are given the assignment. Which is worse, by the way, since those who wait longer will have probably learned more about the subject in the meantime.

Identifying features of procrastination

So I stopped by my university's library this afternoon after walking my husband to class. I didn't bring anything with me to work on...not even a spiral notebook. Just a pen that was riding around in my purse. But I thought I should take a look at recent journal publications. You know, the kind that are actually printed on paper.

Anyway, in CCC, Sean Zwagerman writes about plagiarism and takes a quick swipe at procrastination. He says, "About ten years ago, I was marking an essay whose night-before prose suddently transitioned into sophisticated literary analysis" (676).

"Night-before prose"? What is that exactly? He's clearly referring to a writing which can be easily identified as having been written recently before being turned in. But what are the identifying features? He doesn't say. I don't suppose I can expect an in-depth analysis of procrastination when the issue at hand is actually plagiarism. But, in scholarly articles, how do we get away with such problematic assumptions as teachers who can identify the age of a piece of writing by instructor's intuition?

And seriously, what are the identifying features of procrastinated writing? It's not surface error. It's not length. It might be the use of evidence, but how does that translate into "night-before prose"? How are we analyzing student prose? Sentence structure? Diction? Beats me.

I think about a basic writing student I had last year, "Patrick." Patrick had the strongest prose in my class, yet was one of the biggest procrastinators. The paper he wrote in an hour before class was more interesting than the one he worked with a tutor revising. This is not to say that the paper he wrote quickly was well-organized or well-supported. But I'm pretty skeptical that weak prose is a sign of procrastination.

You know what weak prose is a sign of? A student that needs to work on their prose. It's not just time pressure, it's gaps in learning that are the issue. Problems in student writing are not a moral issue with the students, something that would be solved if they'd merely shape up and follow the rules. Problems in writing exist because students haven't mastered the skill of writing--which is kind of why they're writing students in the first place.

Zwagerman, Sean. "The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity." College Composition and Communication 59.4 (2008): 676-710.