UNDERSTANDING STUDENT PROCRASTINATION ON PROJECTS: WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT?

Instructors lament and lambast procrastination as having a negative impact on student grades and learning, and tend to explain the behavior away as a lack of life experience. However, writing this abstract the day before the deadline, we ask if and how procrastination is impacted by students’ prior life experiences and demographics, including whether they entered college directly out of high school or first entered the workforce or military. Furthermore, we ask whether students who procrastinated on projects received different grades or learned different amounts than their peers. We will analyze survey data, times of access for project components recorded by a course management system, project grades, and pre- and post-test scores from Geoscience Concept Inventory questions given with out-of-class projects in two semesters of an introductory geology course at a large public Midwestern university. The results of this analysis will help instructors predict their students’ approach to out-of-class project time management, and help instructors decide whether to structure projects to prevent procrastination.