Academic Procrastination in the Structure of Learning Activity Styles in Students

The paper focuses on one of the aspects of student behaviour, academic procrastination, in the context of learning activity organization. Since academic procrastination is highly prevalent in student environment, it can be assumed that its manifestations are stable characteristics of the individual’s learning activity style at the stage of university education. We present outcomes of a study that involved 449 students of different universities aged 17—23 and evaluated the indicators of learning activity styles with respect to academic procrastination. In this study we identify the psychological structure of the phenomenon, describing four types of academic procrastination and two ‘protection factors’. We outline the prevalence of different types of academic procrastination and different learning activity styles across the entire sample as well as across the subsamples of students of different universities. Also, we reveal two fundamentally opposite types of correlation between academic procrastination and learning styles (rs, p<0,01) that can be characterized as “Taking the risk of academic procrastination” and “Protecting oneself from academic procrastination”.