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Procrastination is seemingly endemic in American society, especially among college students. Twenty percent of American adults are reported to be chronic procrastinators (Hoover, 2005), but two separate large-scale studies of student procrastination (or, in the parlance of the field, "academic dilatory behavior") indicate that between 75 and 80% of university students report "strong" tendencies for academic dilatory behavior (Schouwenberg, 2004; Ferrari, Johnson & McGown, 1995). In other words, a remarkably large majority of students say that they procrastinate.
Taking up this issue in this forum is not to imply that developmental students are more prone to procrastination than other students. In fact, there may be reason to think they, as a group, are less so, since a recent study indicates that "atrisk" (a designation that would include many in developmental courses) students are more engaged in their studies than other students (CCSSE, 2005). Nonetheless, because up to four-fifths of all students procrastinate, developmental educators work with many students who are likely to benefit from attention to this issue.
Given the intellectual, achievement, and motivational implications of procrastination, I address the topic directly in my course, "Strategies for Success." Offered under the auspices of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, the course is a semester-long, two-unit seminar aimed at assisting students as they transition into upper-division course work. Topics include learning and time management principles, strategies and techniques, discourse, learning and achievement in the disciplines, as well as motivation and procrastination. I devote an entire two-hour session to the causes of, and strategies for overcoming, procrastination. My aim is to counter conventional, often unexamined beliefs about the reasons why people procrastinate, and introduce to students a self-worth theory of motivation perspective (Covington, 1992, Covington & Beery, 1976) on this widespread problem.
To prepare students for class activities, I assign an eye-opening article from Psychology Today called "Mind Games Procrastinators Play" written by clinical psychologists Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen (see Appendix A for an advanced organizer.). This short article nicely illustrates a self-worth theory approach to understanding and overcoming procrastination. Self-worth theory explains the putatively self-sabotaging behavior of procrastination as motivated by students' fundamental need to protect their self-concept as able and worthy. Believing, as Burka and Yuen put...