The Temporal Dynamics of Procrastination and its Impact on Academic Performance: The Case of a Task-oriented Programming Course

Abstract

Procrastination is one of the most common problems among students causing mental health issues, low motivation, and poor academic performance. The emergence of Learning Management Systems has made it possible to accurately pinpoint when procrastination takes place due to the unobtrusive collection of fine-grained data from students. However, most studies that analyze procrastination regard it as an intrinsic characteristic of students. In this work, we study procrastination as a process that unfolds with time. We use sequence analysis to map the evolution of students’ procrastination behavior over a task-oriented programming course. Our findings evince that students’ procrastination is not constant throughout a course and that students who tend to procrastinate are those who achieve worse academic performance. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).