In this study we characterize student procrastination habits and investigate associations between these habits and student performance on graded course components, student beliefs about their own procrastination behavior, and gender. The procrastination habits of calculus-based introductory physics students are measured via the amount of time before the assignment deadline or “completion time” that students submit their work on relatively short ($>30\min$) weekly online assignments. With the aid of latent profile analysis, we find that one can meaningfully categorize students into 4 completion time classes that clearly distinguish students between their mean completion time, their week-to-week completion time patterns, assignment completion rates, mean course grades, and proportion of women. Consistent with many studies in a variety of contexts, we find that procrastinating students tend to have lower course grades. Closer examination of exam and nonexam grade components reveals that completion time is directly associated with the nonexam component, but its association with the exam component is weaker and completely mediated by the nonexam component grade. This is in contrast to student ACT score, which is strongly associated with exam component but only weakly associated with the nonexam component, and the direct association of ACT with the exam scores is only weakly mediated by nonexam scores. Further, we find that ACT score is at best very weakly correlated with completion time. Taken together this supports the idea that exam and nonexam components are separately predicted by the two somewhat “orthogonal” measures of ACT score and completion time, and we propose that these are measuring so-called cognitive and noncognitive factors, respectively. Regarding gender differences, we found that on average women tended to procrastinate less than men, submitting the assignments on average 8 h earlier than men. Considering previous studies documenting that women tend to score higher than men on nonexam components, we found that completion time completely mediates the gender differences in nonexam components, providing support for the hypothesis that procrastination mediates the gender differences in performance on nonexam components. Finally, we found that the overwhelming majority (90%) of students did not strategically (“actively”) intend to delay completion of the assignment, and that students who did indicate actively delaying were 2–3 times more likely to receive a D or E in the course.

中文翻译：

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作业提交时间的模式：拖延、性别、成绩和成绩组成部分

在这项研究中，我们描述了学生的拖延习惯，并调查了这些习惯与学生在分级课程组成部分的表现、学生对自己拖延行为的信念以及性别之间的关联。微积分入门物理学生的拖延习惯是通过作业截止日期前的时间或学生提交作业相对较短的“完成时间”来衡量的。$>30\mathrm{分钟}$) 每周在线作业。借助潜在概况分析，我们发现可以将学生有意义地分为 4 个完成时间类别，这些类别清楚地区分学生的平均完成时间、每周完成时间模式、作业完成率、平均课程成绩和女性的比例。与在各种背景下进行的许多研究一致，我们发现拖延的学生的课程成绩往往较低。对考试和非考试成绩成分的仔细检查表明，完成时间与非考试成分直接相关，但其与考试成分的关联较弱，完全由非考试成分成绩介导。这与学生的 ACT 分数形成对比，它与考试成分强相关，但与非考试成分仅微弱相关，ACT 与考试分数的直接关联仅受非考试分数的微弱调节。此外，我们发现 ACT 分数至多与完成时间的相关性非常弱。综上所述，这支持了这样一种观点，即考试和非考试部分分别由 ACT 分数和完成时间这两个有点“正交”的衡量标准来预测，我们建议它们分别衡量所谓的认知和非认知因素。关于性别差异，我们发现平均而言，女性比男性更容易拖延，平均比男性早 8 小时提交作业。考虑到之前的研究表明，女性在非考试部分的得分往往高于男性，我们发现完成时间完全中介了非考试部分的性别差异，这为拖延介导了非考试部分表现的性别差异的假设提供了支持。最后，我们发现绝大多数 (90%) 的学生并没有战略性地（“主动”）打算延迟完成作业，并且确实表示主动延迟完成的学生获得 D 或E 在课程中。