Background & Objectives: Academic procrastination is one of the most common psychological and educational issues for students and may cause psychological disabilities and dysfunction in many dimensions of life. Self–doubt, fear of failure, and irrational beliefs are important predictors of procrastination. Based on implicit intelligence theory, individuals with a fixed mindset believe that human qualities such as intelligence and abilities are static, and they are inclined to fear challenge and devalue effort. In contrast, those with a growth mindset recognize that basic qualities are dynamic, and they tend to embrace challenges and value effort. From the self–determination theory perspective, autonomous motivation results from satisfying one’s basic psychological needs. Given this perspective, it is possible that targeting basic psychological needs could have implications for procrastination. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of two educational methods of growth mindset and self–determination in reducing academic procrastination of female high school students.
Methods: This quasi–experimental study has a pretest–posttest and a 1–month follow–up design with a control group. The statistical population comprised eighth– and ninth–grade female students studying in high schools of Shahr–e–Ray City, Iran, in the academic year of 2017–2018. A total of 45 students were selected using the random sampling method and assigned to three groups (two experimental and one control group). For one of the experimental groups, five training sessions of Growth Mindset designed by Khan Academy Institute and Stanford University (2018), and for the other experimental group, six sessions of Self–determination training designed by Dashti Dariyan (2018) were held. No training program was implemented for the control group. Academic Procrastination Questionnaire (Savari, 2012) was employed to investigate three procrastination factors: deliberate procrastination, procrastination due to fatigue, and procrastination due to lack of planning. To describe and analyze the data, descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (the Chi–square test, 1–way and repeated measures analysis of variance, and Bonferroni's post hoc test) were used in SPSS version 24. The significance level of all tests was considered to be 0.05.
Results: Results showed that the implementation of the independent variables of Growth Mindset and Self–determination training decreased deliberate procrastination (p<0.001), procrastination due to fatigue (p<0.001), and procrastination due to lack of planning (p<0.001) over time compared to the control group. The interaction effect of group*time decreased deliberate procrastination (p<0.001), procrastination due to fatigue (p<0.001), and procrastination due to lack of planning (p<0.001). The significant difference between Growth Mindset and Self–determination training was only in the deliberate procrastination component (p=0.021). The differences between the averages of all three components of procrastination in the pretest and posttest stages (p<0.001) and between the pretest and follow–up stages (p<0.001) were significant. The non–significant difference between the posttest and follow–up stages showed the persistence of the effect of both training in the follow–up stage (p>0.05).
Conclusion: Based on the study findings, Growth Mindset and Self–determination training can reduce all three types of procrastination (deliberate, due to fatigue, and lack of planning) in students. However, the effect of growth mindset training in the component of deliberate procrastination is more than the training of self–determination.