Comparison of Academic Procrastination and Academic Engagement of Rural and Urban Students in Bojnourd City

The school is one of the most important social and academic institutions and the most important element of education, which is established and administered in accordance with the goals approved by the academic curriculum and the standards and guidelines of the Ministry of Education. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare the degree of academic procrastination and the students’ academic Engagement. The research was descriptive in terms of purpose, and applied in terms of methodology. The statistical population consisted of all female students of the sixth grade of rural and urban elementary schools of Bojnourd City; 1164 sixth-grade girls in urban schools and 669 girls in rural elementary schools, according to a report prepared by the Ministry of Education of Bojnourd in the academic year 2017-2018. The stratified sampling method was used to determine the sample size. A sample of 320 urban students and 268 rural students were selected based on Cochran formula at the error level 5%. The instruments for data collection were Solomon & Roth Blum Academic Procrastination Questionnaire (1984), and Academic Engagement Questionnaire of Frederic et al. (2004), which had formal and content validity, and reliability was obtained 0.84 and 0.87, respectively, according to Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Data were analyzed by SPSS-21 software using t-test at the significance level of 0.05. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the academic procrastination scores of rural and urban students (p <0.05). The mean of urban students' procrastination was greater than that of rural students. There was also a difference between academic Engagement of rural and urban students (p <0.05). About 47 percent of rural students and about 53 percent of urban students had academic procrastination. Also, about 57% of rural students and about 63% of urban students had a high degree of academic Engagement.