College of Public Health and Human Sciences

Academic procrastination can be a substantive problem for some students (Steel, 2007), and the reasons for and functions of task postponement have gained a great deal of research attention over the last 10 years. However, little research has examined academic motivation and self-efficacy as unique predictors of procrastination. We hypothesized that academic motivation and self-efficacy together would have a strong negative relationship to academic procrastination among college students, with academic motivation having a stronger relationship than self-efficacy. A sample of 101 undergraduate students (36.6% men, 63.4% women; M = 20.76, SD = 2.54, years of age) at a Northeastern public liberal arts university participated in the present study. Significant negative correlations of medium to large effect sizes between academic procrastination and 3 types of intrinsic, 1 type of extrinsic academic motivation, and general self-efficacy were shown. In a hierarchical regression model, academic motivation predicted academic procrastination, R2 change = .33, F(7, 93) = 6.54, p < .001, but self-efficacy did not make a unique contribution to the model beyond the variance accounted for by academic motivation, R2 change = .022, F(1, 92) = 3.09, p = .082.