The mediator role of need for cognition on the relationship between secondary school students' academic procrastination behaviors and attitudes towards school

The aim of this study is to investigate the mediator role of the need for cognition in the relationship between academic procrastination and school attitude in secondary school students. The research also examined whether the scores obtained from the data collection tools change according to their gender, age, type of school, grade level, socio-economic level, and general academic achievement level. The quantitative data of the study were collected from 498 students attending different high school types in Gaziantep in the 2018-2019 academic year. As data collection tools; Academic Procrastination Scale, School Attitude Rating Scale and Need for Cognition Scale were used. In the analysis of the data, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used by using SPSS25 AMOS package program which is an extension of this program. Independent Sample t-Test and One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to determine the differences between the groups. Pearson Correlation Analysis was used to determine the relationship between the mean scores of the students. According to the findings of the study, correlation coefficients between the students' heel scores were statistically significant; and the need for cognition in the relationship between academic procrastination and school attitudes has a partial mediating effect. In general, when the variances explained in the model were evaluated, it was found that academic procrastination alone explained about 58% of school attitude variable and about 16% of need for cognition variable. When the effects of other variables were also taken into account in the explained variances, it was seen that academic procrastination and need for cognition variables together explained about 59% of the school attitude variable. Keywords: Academic procrastination, Need for cogniton, School attitude