A study on the prediction of academic procrastination among university students

The aim of this research is to examine the relationships between academic procrastination, five factors of personality, academic locus of control, fear of failure and perceived teacher effectiveness and to investigate five factors of personality, academic locus of control, fear of failure and perceived teacher effectiveness as predictors of academic procrastination among university students. Participants were 587 undergraduate students (425 female and 162 male) attending the different major fields at four faculties (The Faculty of Education, The Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and The Faculty of Engineering) in Çukurova University. The respondents are recruited from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th level of classes and the number of students in each class level is 186, 166, 173 and 62, respectively. The data of the present study was collected through "Academic Procrastination Scale" developed by Çakıcı (2003), "Big Five Inventory" developed by John, Donahue and Kentle (1991) and adapted into Turkish culture by Karaman, Doğan ve Çoban (2010), "Academic Locus of Control Scale" developed by Akın (2007), "Fear of Failure Scale" developed by Kandemir (2012) and "Student Evaluation of Faculty Form" developed by Blatt and Carloyn (1993) and adopted into Turkish culture by Ergin and Geçer (1999). Testing the normality of the distribution, the Mahalonobis distance is calculated in order for finding outliers in the data. Then the outliers are excluded from the data and the analysis was done. In order to analyze the data The Pearson Product- Moment Correlation Coefficient, Multiple Linear Regression and Stepwise Multiple Regression Analysis were used. As a result, academic procrastination was positively and significantly correlated with external locus of control, fear of failure and is negatively and significantly correlated with perceived teacher effectiveness, extraversion and openness to experience. External locus of control, perceived teacher effectiveness and extraversion significantly predicted academic procrastination among university students. External locus of control was the most significant predictor for academic procrastination. The results of this study were contextualized in relation to existing research and possible implications for future research were suggested. Keywords: Academic procrastination, big five factors of personality, academic locus of control, fear of failure and perceived teacher effectivess.