Tuesday, February 17, 2009

A Study about Procrastination in Writing!

I perked up pretty quickly at noticing an article had the both the words "writing" and "procrastination" in the title. What these authors (Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Kathleen M. T. Collins) have done is to administer a couple of questionnaires to a group of masters' students. One measured writing apprehension (which is what it sounds like, being apprehensive about writing); the other measured academic procrastination (procrastinating on school assignments).

According to Onwuegbizie and Collins, "these findings suggest that graduate students' apprehension about writing appears to be related to academic procrastination stemming from fear of failure and task aversiveness" (562). I'm skeptical about their use of "stemming from." Seems like a way to say "cause" without tripping the readers' mental alarms about confusing correlation and causation. In fact, Onwuegbizie and Collins go on to suggest that the situation feeds itself, that procrastination also causes fear of failure and task aversiveness...but they don't suggest any mechanism for that.

I'm not sure whether they mean that procrastination triggers guilt or other bad feelings which become associated with the task being avoided, or if they actually intend to suggest that procrastination causes bad writing, which reinforces the fear of failure. (The difference between fear of failure and task aversiveness is that fear of failure means you think you'll get a bad grade or harsh critique. Task aversiveness means you hate actually sitting down to write, even if you expect a good score.) I'm having trouble seeing another mechanism for reinforcing the fear of failure other than actually getting bad grades or something.

Now, this study is of grad students, where I'm studying undergrads. I skimmed an abstract today that suggested that level of education was not a major factor in amount of procrastination, but age was. Need to find that again.

Work Cited

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J., and Kathleen M. T. Collins. "Writing Apprehension and Academic Procrastination among Graduate Students." Perceptual and Motor Skills 92 (2001): 560-562.

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