The efficiency of Procrastination Reduction Training on Lowering Self-Handicapping and Enhancing Academic Engagement among University Students

Self-Handicapping and lack of academic engagement correlate with procrastination and are among the problems of learners with academic failure, causing negative and unrepairable consequences for these students. Self-handicapping concept indicates that learners justify their educational failures using some strategies and by this means they obscure the relationship between educational performance and personal attributes. Also, self-handicapping leads to a reduction of emotional well-being, self-esteem, and mental motivation and even the increase in negative mood syndrome and more use of toxic drugs. The self-handicapping individuals’ strategies for overcoming educational problems focus on ignoring the situation and the negative self-concentration. Studies have revealed that the self-handicapped people have a weaker educational performance compared with ordinary people. On the other hand, educational procrastination correlates with instructional duties and has been defined as an unreasonable delay in doing educational assignments that should be done in due time. These individuals skip their educational activities for procrastination and respond to immediately required duties about their education. This causes many problems that sometimes are irreparable. The remedy for procrastination, educational self-handicapping, low educational achievement, high levels of boredom, reluctance and high educational failure is engaging students in educational activities. Academic engagement opposes procrastination and lack of participation that rely on the absence of efforts and perseverance and shows itself in the form of indifference, lack of creativity and effort, and quitting the activity, signifying negative emotions such as debilitative emotions (like fatigue, sadness, and melancholy), frustration, anger, and stress feelings (like anxiety) during the activity. According to those above empirical and theoretical bases, academic procrastination has a close and directional relationship with self-handicapping and a negative relationship with an academic engagement at the same time. However, these previous studies have focused on the reduction of procrastination and have paid less attention to other related factors such as self-handicapping and academic engagement. Most of these studies have been done on high school students, and fewer and probably less effective studies have been carried out on the university students. Moreover, the relationship between academic procrastination and self-handicapping has been explored through correlational rather than cause-and-effect the studies. Accordingly, the current research has attempted to examine the efficiency of a training package for procrastination reduction on university students’ self-handicapping and academic engagement, and it differs from previous studies in its sample, method, and purposes. This study tries to scrutinize this question that whether training package for procrastination reduction can simultaneously reduce students’ self-handicapping and enhance their academic engagement. The current study utilizes a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design. The statistical population of this study included all undergraduate students at different branches of Islamic Azad University in Hamedan province with academic failure in the educational year of 1396-1397. The Islamic Azad University of Asadabad was selected as the study sample based on random sampling. Then, Procrastination Questionnaire was voluntarily filled out by 40 students with the highest procrastination scores were selected and randomly assigned into a control and an experimental group. Afterward, Jones and Rhodewalt’s Self-Handicapping Scale and Reeve and Tseng’s Academic Engagement Questionnaire were given to the participants in the two groups as the pretest. The training package for procrastination reduction was given to the experimental group for six subsequent sessions. Finally, the two groups filled out the questionnaires mentioned above as the posttest. The data were analyzed using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Results showed that the training package for procrastination reduction significantly lowered self-handicapping and enhanced academic engagement (p<0.001). By implementing this training package, the individuals’ motivation for doing educational activities and acquiring positive consequences and also their academic engagement will increase. This package is efficient for its multidimensionality including cognition, motivation, and behavior at the same time. To achieve this goal, students will acquire behavioral, cognitive, and emotional strategies to confront procrastination in different situations. Because of the efficiency of this training package, it is recommended for all those people who are involved in teaching and learning. Educational counselors and psychologists can also utilize this training package to help their students and clients.