Publication details
Plans, goals, hopes, or wishful thinking? Level of representation of non-academic “important tasks” predicts academic self-regulatory problems
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The preliminary study explores the effects of explicit representation of "current important tasks" on academic procrastination and related self-regulatory problems. A sample of 58 students were asked to make a list of "important tasks they feel they should currently be working on", which were rated according to their concreteness, finality, complexity and ambitiousness. The students also completed measures of academic procrastination and various study-related self-regulatory problems. It was expected that self-regulatory failure would be positively correlated to abstract and ambitious representations of tasks, demonstrating lack of implementation skill. The effect of explicit task representation on chronic procrastination, however, was only marginal. Interestingly, representation of tasks other than academic ones turned out to be a much better predictor of self-regulatory problems, especially those indicating paradoxical discrepancy between interest and engagement. This is probably because explicit representation of academic tasks in all students tends to be pre-determined by official formulation of demands. |