The Future of Education

Procrastination is the action of putting off a task that has to be accomplished. This postponement can compromise several areas of the person's life. Academic procrastination is a way of putting off performing academic tasks. It is considered a failure in the students' self-regulation process. The objective of our work was to know, on the one hand, the attitude of a group of online students towards time management - academic procrastination. On the other hand, the relationship between the procrastination quotient and the hours they dedicate to study. To this end, we used a sample of 482 subjects, 78.8% female and 21.2% male. Their average age is 40 years, ranging between 19 and 63 years. 64.1% attend distance learning between 0 and 1 year. The largest group, 25.5% of our sample, says they study between 4 and 6 hours a week. As a data collection instrument, we used a questionnaire consisting of 10 questions with an alpha of 0.793. Our results point to a lack of a significant relationship between the procrastination quotient and sex. However, we found a negative and significant correlation between the type of procrastinator and weekly study time, with a shorter study time corresponding to a higher level of procrastination.

These results suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider the individual characteristics of students involved in designing and optimizing online learning environments.