Student Procrastination on an E-learning Platform: From Individual Discounting to Group Behavior
Steeper delay discounting predicts academic procrastination and poorer grades in university students.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched how college students used an online course.
They tracked when each student turned in work.
They also gave each student a short test of delay discounting.
This test shows how steeply a person devalues rewards that come later.
The study linked those scores to final course grades.
What they found
Students who scored high on delay discounting turned work in late.
Most of them also earned lower final grades.
Across the whole class, submissions spiked right before each deadline.
The pattern looked like a hyperbolic scallop on a cumulative graph.
How this fits with other research
Kim et al. (2024) found the opposite in second graders.
Their online token system made average and struggling students work harder.
Age is the key difference.
Young kids will work for immediate tokens, but adults skip work when no instant payoff exists.
Malkin et al. (2018) showed that forcing college students to post in discussion boards raised quiz scores.
That study proves you can fight online procrastination with active requirements.
Fluharty et al. (2024) used group contingencies to boost middle-school preparedness.
Their positive result hints that shared, high-p reinforcers might also help university cohorts.
Why it matters
If your learner is older than high-school, assume steep discounting will push them to procrastinate.
Break big deadlines into smaller ones with quick feedback.
Add early, low-stakes point opportunities to create immediate reward.
These small moves can flatten the scallop and lift final grades.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Most applied research on delay discounting has focused on substance use disorders, eating, or gambling. In comparison, the issue of procrastination has received little interest from quantitative behavior analysts. In the present study, conducted on an e-learning platform, a group of 295 psychology students completed a series of four tests. The students could choose the day and hour on which they completed the tests, the deadline for each test being separated from the previous one by a period of 30 days. Most students completed the test in the last days before the deadline. The group response profile across days, reminiscent of fixed-interval scalloping, was well described formally by a hyperbola, replicating previous results by Howell et al. (2006). Also, the students’ individual degree of procrastination showed stability across tests, in accordance with the notion of discounting as a persistent behavioral trait, and was negatively correlated with the students’ grades. Finally, the shape of the scallop observed at the group level was consistent with a lognormal density of individual degrees of impulsivity, as measured by people’s delay-discounting parameter.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2021 · doi:10.1007/s40614-021-00321-y