Time Flies, but You’re in Control: the Mediating Effect of Self-control between Time Attitude and Academic Procrastination

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2601531/v1

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Time Flies, but You’re in Control: the Mediating Effect of Self-control between Time Attitude and Academic Procrastination

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2601531/v1

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A holiday is a time of rest. However, the abrupt lifting of lockdowns in China made middle schools postpone their final exams to the end of the winter holiday. Chinese middle school students experienced an unprecedented holiday, in which they struggled between procrastinating and sticking to the review plan. This study thus investigated their academic procrastination within this extraordinary context. Prior studies also suggested the correlation among academic procrastination, time attitude and self-control. Therefore, we expected a mediating effect of self-control on the relationship between procrastination and time attitude. Initially, we used a questionnaire survey to obtain students’ self-reported data on procrastination, time attitude and self-control. Then, we implemented a case study to check students’ completion of the review plan in real settings. The results of both the survey and the case study indicated that Chinese middle school students demonstrated a greater tendency for academic procrastination. Additionally, self-control negatively correlated with academic procrastination, and self-control significantly mediated the relationship between academic procrastination and positive time attitudes. This study enriches the existing research with data from a novel situation, and supplies empirical evidence for teaching regulation and intervention.

academic procrastination

time attitude

self-control

mixed method

A holiday is a time of rest from places such as work and school. (Hornby, 2017, p. 1004). However, Chinese junior and senior middle school students have an extraordinarily busy holiday this winter. Because of the nationwide lockdown lift on December 6th, 2022 in China, nearly all middle schools did not hold final exams at the end of the autumn semester, and instead postponed them to the beginning of the following spring semester. Therefore, students have never had a longer time to prepare for the final exams than this winter holiday. Under this unprecedented situation, would students make full use of this period to improve their performance in the coming exams, or irrationally put off the tasks and even avoid the review activities to enjoy the holiday (Tuckman, 1991)? This study aims to determine Chinese middle school students’ tendency to procrastinate during this special winter holiday. At the same time, procrastination is “a temporal self-regulation failure that reflects a disjunction between the present and the future self” (Sirois, 2014). This suggests that time attitude is an important contributing factor to procrastination. A present-oriented time attitude increases the likelihood of procrastination, while a future-oriented time attitude decreases the risk of it (Kim et al., 2017). This study intends to further this topic under this extraordinary context, expanding the time attitude to all three dimensions (past-oriented, present-oriented and future-oriented). Moreover, time attitude is correlated with self-control, in that future-oriented time attitude leads to greater self-control (Wills et al., 2001), which affects problematic behaviours such as procrastination (Tangney et al., 2004). Therefore, we expect a mediating effect of self-control on the relationship between time attitude and academic procrastination.

The existing studies can be furthered from the following aspects. First, most of them use ZTPI (Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory) (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) to measure time perspective, and merely focus on the relationship between future-oriented time attitude and procrastination. Comparatively, ATAS (Adolescent Time Attitude Scale) (Mello & Worrell, 2007) is more suitable for middle school students, and covers all three dimensions of time attitude. This study employs ATAS to investigate the correlation between all three dimensions of time attitude and procrastination. Second, all of them are carried out during regular school time. The unprecedented winter holiday, with exams waiting at its end, is expected to influence students’ time attitude and holiday activities. Whether they can resist the temptations to enjoy the holiday and make full preparations for the exams depends heavily on their self-control. Thus, this study attempts to explore the mediating role of self-control between time attitude and procrastination within this extraordinary context.

After lifting the lockdown, China experienced a sharp increase in confirmed cases. People tended to stay at home to avoid being infected or infecting others. Therefore, at the beginning of the winter holiday, the current study first used an online questionnaire to collect information about students’ time attitude, self-control and procrastination tendencies. At the end of the winter holiday, we used a case study of a junior high class to collect information about the students’ attitudes toward time management and self-control. Also, we checked to see if the students in this class had completed their holiday assignments. Both the questionnaire survey and the case study indicated that students have a great tendency to postpone their homework during this special holiday, and self-control significantly mediates academic procrastination and all positive time attitudes. This study contributes data to the relationship among the three variables in the context of an extraordinary winter holiday, and expands it to three dimensions of the time attitude. Furthermore, the data collected from Chinese middle school students can enrich the investigation of this relationship from different social and cultural backgrounds. At the same time, it reminds instructors of the need to enhance students’ self-control and develop a positive time attitude to decrease procrastination tendencies.

2.1 Procrastination

Procrastination is the tendency to postpone or completely avoid an activity under one’s control (Tuckman & Sexton, 1989). It results from a combination of factors, such as doubt of one’s ability to perform a task, inability to delay gratification, and blame for one’s difficult situation on external sources (Bandura, 1986; Tuckman, 1989). Academic procrastination refers to this irrational behaviour in learning activities. Learners tend to postpone important and necessary learning tasks regardless of possibly being worse off (Steel, 2007), suggesting a disjunction between the present and future self (Sirois, 2014). As time goes by, this failure of temporal self-regulation leads to a decline in academic performance (Wu & Fan, 2017). Therefore, it is necessary to predict students’ procrastination tendencies, in order to assist those who may have such tendencies in overcoming it, or to provide instructors with timely interventions (Tuckman & Sexton, 1989).

Procrastination is associated with various factors. First, a growing number of studies indicate that procrastination is related to negative feelings, such as high levels of stress (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013), frustration and self-blame (Kim et al. 2017). These negative thoughts lead to a pre-occupation with personal flaws that contribute to a lack of concern for the future, because they focus more on the pleasant present as a way to avoid challenging tasks and their possible negative consequences (Sirois, 2014). Second, procrastination has also been found to be caused by an emphasis on the present as opposed to the future (Kim et al., 2017). For this intrinsic time trait of procrastination, researchers attempt to identify the relationship between procrastination and people’s time perspectives (Díaz-Morales & Ferrari, 2015). Generally speaking, procrastination is positively associated with the future time perspective, and is less consistently associated with the present time perspective. Some of the previous studies detected a positive association between procrastination and present-hedonistic time orientation (Díaz-Morales et al., 2008; Ferrari & Díaz-Morales, 2007; Jackson, Fritch, Nagasaka & Pope, 2003; Kim et al., 2017), while others failed to find this association (Specter & Ferrari, 2000; Gupta, Hershey & Gaur, 2012). This highlights the need for additional research on the topic. Besides, the extraordinary winter holiday with exams waiting at the end can offer additional evidence for the relationship between procrastination and time perspective.

2.2 Time attitude

Time perspective is one’s attitude to the passage of time (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999). It consists of the past time perspective, the present time perspective and the future time perspective. The past and present time perspectives are divided into positive and negative dimensions, whereas the future time perspective has no subdivision. Later, Carelli et al. (2011) also divided the future time perspective into positive and negative dimensions. Hence, there are altogether six pairs of positive and negative time perspectives. Time attitude is the emotional aspect of time perspective concerned with adolescents’ attitude or emotional experiences toward the past, the present and the future (Worrell et al., 2013). It also consists of six dimensions in accordance with that of the time perspective. It is more applicable to adolescents, and thus will be our focus in this study.

Previous studies indicate that time attitude is significantly associated with students’ academic procrastination. On the one hand, academic procrastination positively correlates with a negative time attitude. For example, learners might think: “no matter what, I will fail in the future (future negative attitude), why should I bother to do it now (Steel, 2007)?” Or “past experiences prove that I cannot do it well, and I cannot do it well now, either” (present negative attitudes) (Taylor & Wilson, 2016). On the other hand, academic procrastination negatively correlates with a positive time attitude, because people with a positive time attitude also have high esteem, self-efficacy and well-being (Mckay et al., 2016; Worrell et al., 2013), which all contribute to timely and effective actions. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, most existing studies employed ZTPI rather than ATAS, which is more suitable for measuring adolescents’ time attitude. Besides, they paid little attention to past time attitude, which is believed to correlate with procrastination as well (Taylor & Wilson, 2016). This study thus uses ATAS to investigate Chinese middle school students’ time attitude in all dimensions during this special winter holiday.

2.3 Self-control

Self-control is the capability to control one’s own cognition, emotions and behaviours by delaying immediate gratification and adjusting to situational and social needs without external enforcers (Kim et al., 2017). Studies have noted that poor self-control leads to procrastination (Tuckman, 1998). Students with low self-control have difficulty with learning procedures, and are not good at balancing the speed of performing a task with the time of completion. All these result in academic procrastination (Vohs & Heatherton, 2000). On the contrary, students with high self-control can properly use strategies to adjust learning behaviours, successfully preventing procrastination.

Even though prior studies identified a relationship between time attitude, academic procrastination and self-control, they have reported inconsistent findings. Moreover, there has been no discussion on the mediating effect of self-control on the relationship between procrastination and time attitude, especially in this exceptional situation. Furthermore, all their data came from a single source: a questionnaire. To augment the results from the questionnaire survey, it is important to also measure actual behaviours. Therefore, this study uses a mixed method – a questionnaire survey and case study – to provide more convincing evidence for the topic within this extraordinary situation.

3.1 Participants

To obtain a representative sample, we used the sample service provided by the Questionnaire Star platform, which enrolled participants based on age and location. A total of 326 junior and senior middle school students, all Chinese native speakers from 13 provinces and regions in China, took part in our online questionnaire survey.

The survey was launched on January 16^th 2022 (the winter holiday started on January 9^th 2022) and closed on January 22^nd 2022. We excluded three participants from our analysis due to inconsistent responses regarding age (they wrote their name or grade for age information). Therefore, the final sample comprised 323 participants. More details can be found in Table 1.

3.2 Measures (see Appendix)

Academic Procrastination Questionnaire for Chinese middle school students (APQC)

APQC (in the Chinese language) was adapted from the Procrastination Scale developed by Tuckman (1991). APQC consists of 20 items, covering homework procrastination, self-study procrastination, and exam-preparation procrastination (Xu & Wang, 2011). Each item is rated on a five-point Likert scale ranging from “never” (1) to “always” (5). The higher the score is, the more serious the procrastination is. Its reliability is high in Chinese middle school students (α=.90, Li & Lv, 2022).

Chinese version of Adolescent Time Attitude Scale (CATAS)

CATAS is the Chinese version of Adolescent Time Attitude Scale (Mello & Worrell, 2007). It consists of 30 items with five items for each dimension of time attitude: past positive, past negative, present positive, present negative, future positive, and future negative (Li, Mao, Lv & Wang, 2021). Each item is rated on a five-point Likert scale ranging from “completely agree” (1) to “completely disagree” (5). Its reliability in Chinese high school and college students ranged from 0.77 to 0.86 (Li, Mao, Lv & Wang, 2021).

Chinese version of the Brief Self Control Measure (CBSC)

CBSC is the Chinese version of the Brief Self Control Measure developed by Tangney, Baumeister and Boone (2004). It consists of 16 items, covering impulsion control, health habit, temptation resistance, concentration, and recreational control. Each item is rated on a five-point Likert scale ranging from “completely not applicable to me” (1) to “completely applicable to me” (5). Its reliability in Chinese college students is 0.85 (Tan & Guo, 2008).

In addition, we collected participants’ demographic information of age, gender, education level, location and whether they were to have make-up exams for the final exams.

3.3 Results and Discussion

All data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 25. First, the data were divided into four parts: demographic information, academic procrastination, time attitude, and self-control. Next, Cronbach’s α, mean (M), standard deviation (SD) and correlations were calculated among the four variables. Then, we used Hayes (2013) SPSS macro PROCESS (Model 4) based on a 5000 bootstrap to check the mediating role of self-control in the relationship between academic procrastination and time attitude.

3.3.1 Demographic Information

Table 1 contains the demographic information of all participants. Of them, 178 (55.11%) were female and aged between 12 and 19 years (M=15.31, SD=2.89). 175 (54.18%) of them were junior middle school students. They originated in three different regions of China: the south-east (133, 41.18%), the centre (67, 20.74%), and the north-west (123, 38.08%). 253 of them (78.33%) said they had to take make-up exams.

Table 1 Demographic Information

Age	Range	12-19
Age	Mean	15.31 (SD=2.89)
		Number	Percentage (%)
Gender	Male	145	44.89
Gender	Female	178	55.11
Education level	Junior Middle Schools	175	54.18
Education level	Senior Middle Schools	148	45.82
Location	South-east	133	41.18
	Central	67	20.74
	North-west	123	38.08
Whether make-up exams are needed	Yes	253	78.33
Whether make-up exams are needed	No	70	21.67

3.3.2 Descriptive Statistics and Correlations among variables

Table 2 presents the descriptive statistics and correlations among variables. It shows that self-control negatively correlates with procrastination at a significant level (r = -.53, p < .01), and positively correlates with future positive time attitude (r = .21, p < .05), present positive time attitude (r = .22, p < .05), and past positive time attitude (r = .27, p < .05) at a significant level. This is in line with previous findings that stronger self-control decreases the risk of procrastination (Kim et al., 2017; Tuckman, 1998) and that higher scores on self-control correlate with more optimal emotional responses (Tangney, Baumeister & Boone, 2004). However, no significant correlation was detected between academic procrastination and all six dimensions of time attitude. This partially contradicts the existing finding that a positive future time attitude is negatively correlated with procrastination (Kim et al., 2017; McKay et al., 2016; Worrell et al., 2013).

Table 2 Correlations among variables (CI=95%)

	M	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
1 self-control	3.01	0.49	1
2 procrastination	2.60	0.43	-.53**	1
3 future positive	2.16	0.77	.21*	.19	1
4 future negative	3.54	0.84	.16	.03	-.29*	1
5 present positive	2.53	0.70	.22*	.18	.75**	-.11	1
6 present negative	3.13	0.70	.22	.17	-.20	.75*	-.18	1
7 past positive	2.42	0.67	.27*	.14	.65**	-.16	.60**	-.07	1
8 past negative	3.25	0.87	.85	-.05	-.02	.57**	-.03	.50**	-.25*	1

(** means p < .01, * means p < .05)

3.3.3 The Mediating Effect

SPSS macro PROCESS (Model 4) developed by Hayes (2013) was used to check the mediating role of self-control in the relationship between academic procrastination and time attitude (based on a 5000 bootstrap). The results are presented in Table 3. It indicates that self-control significantly mediates the relationship between future positive time attitude and academic procrastination, 95% CI = [0.2914, 0.6225] (p < 0.05), and past positive time attitude and academic procrastination, 95% CI = [0.3019, 0.6370] (p < 0.05), but marginally mediates the relationship between present positive time attitude and academic procrastination, 95% CI = [-0.0050, 0.2195] (p = 0.06). There is no mediating effect of self-control between all the negative time attitudes and academic procrastination. This partially aligns with our expectation that self-control mediates between time attitude and academic procrastination. Nevertheless, the results primarily rely on self-reported measures. To increase the validity of our findings, we used a behaviour measure to obtain data on students’ procrastination in real settings. The details are reported in Section 4.

Table 3 The Mediating Effect

	β	t	R²	95% CI
FP-SC-Pro	0.07	2.00	0.03	0.2914, 0.6225
FN-SC-Pro	0.04	1.42	-0.00	-0.0635, 0.0361
PP-SC-Pro	0.07	1.87	0.03	-0.0050, 0.2195
PN-SC-Pro	0.07	1.88	0.03	-0.0102, 0.1817
PAP-SC-Pro	0.09	2.27	0.03	0.3019, 0.6370
PAN-SC-Pro	0.01	0.19	-0.00	-0.0656, 0.0245

（FP=future positive, SC=self-control, Pro=procrastination, FN=future negative, PP=present positive, PN=present negative, PAP=past positive, PAN=past negative）

With the outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide, many online teaching platforms emerged to facilitate long-distance teaching activities. In China, Ding Talk was the most popular platform for primary and middle school teachers and students (Wei, Zhang & Ren, 2021). Teachers can assign a deadline for each piece of homework, and remind students who do not hand in the homework to submit it timely. The number and names of these students can be easily obtained from teachers’ reminder messages in the class group in Ding Talk. Thus, this study obtained approval from the head teacher of a seventh-grade class, and used the information provided in the submission of homework as the source of data for academic procrastination. Since academic procrastination was rated from 1 to 5, we matched the percentages of students who did not hand in homework on time with the following scale: 1 equals the percentage of 20% or less, 2 from 20–40%, 3 from 40–60%, 4 from 60–80%, and 5 from 80–100%. The total percentage of not submitting homework was 64.97%; thus, we rated it as 3.25. At the end of the winter holiday, all students (42 in total) in the class finished the online questionnaires on time attitude and self-control in order to verify the results of the questionnaire survey. The descriptive statistics and correlations of the three variables are presented in Table 4.

Table 4

Descriptive statistics of the three variables in the case study
	M	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
1 self-control	2.97	0.60	1
2 procrastination	3.25	0.57	− .62**	1
3 future positive	2.30	0.71	.57**	.46**	1
4 future negative	3.34	0.82	.34*	.24	24	1
5 present positive	2.68	0.63	.61**	.54**	.75*	.47**	1
6 present negative	2.99	0.68	.33*	.35*	− .35*	.83**	− .49	1
7 past positive	2.51	0.55	.58**	.46**	.68**	− .36	.67**	− .46	1
8 past negative	3.16	0.68	.25	0.30	− .38	.69**	− .46	.71**	− .47*	1
(*means p < .01, means p < .05)

Table 4 indicates that the students in this class have slightly weaker self-control (M = 2.97, M = 0.60) than the participants in the questionnaire survey (M = 3.01, SD = 0.49), a higher procrastination tendency (M = 3.25, SD = 0.57) than that in the survey (M = 2.60, SD = 0.43), and there is a significant correlation between these two variables (r = − .62, p < .01). This can be explained by the traits of seventh grade. During the transition period from primary school to junior middle school, these students learn to be independent in their studies, and parents give them more freedom to balance learning activities and entertainment. However, those with weak self-regulation are still not capable of arranging their tasks and entertainment reasonably and effectively (Karaca, Bektas, & Celikkiran, 2022). Therefore, they may display weaker self-control than the general level and not finish their homework on time. Different from the questionnaire survey, students in this class demonstrate a significant correlation between academic procrastination and four dimensions of time attitude. This aligns with prior studies, which found that time attitude is an important determinant of academic procrastination (Sirois, 2014). Taken together, this study also obtains inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between time attitude and procrastination. This again illustrates the complicated relationship between procrastination and time perception (Levasseur et al., 2020; Tuckman, 1991). Following this, we used SPSS macro PROCESS (Model 4), based on a 5000 bootstrap developed by Hayes (2013), to examine the mediating role of self-control in the relationship between academic procrastination and time attitude. The results are presented in Table 5.

Table 5

The Mediating Effect in the case study
	β	t	R²	95% CI
FP-SC-Pro	0.20	0.10	0.21	0.0354, 0.4221
FN-SC-Pro	0.11	0.09	0.06	-0.0049, 0.3234
PP-SC-Pro	0.22	0.11	0.29	0.0336, 0.4916
PN-SC-Pro	0.13	0.10	0.12	-0.0310, 0.3567
PAP-SC-Pro	0.27	0.11	0.21	0.0687, 0.5159
PAN-SC-Pro	0.10	0.13	0.09	-0.0473, 0.4351

Table 5 shows that self-control significantly mediates the relationship between academic procrastination and future positive time attitude (95% CI = [0.0354, 0.4221]), present positive time attitude (95% CI = [0.0336, 0.4916]) and past positive time attitude (95% CI = [0.0687, 0.5159]). This provides additional evidence from data on actual behaviour in real settings to support the results of the questionnaire survey.

After the lifting of lockdowns in China, most middle schools postponed the autumn semester’s final exams to the beginning of the following spring semester. That means students had to prepare for the exams during the winter holiday. This unprecedented winter holiday raises the question of whether students would concentrate on the preparation plan, or delay and even avoid learning activities during the holiday. Using a mixed methods approach of a questionnaire survey and case study, this study discovered that academic procrastination is a significant tendency among Chinese middle school students. Self-control can significantly mitigate this tendency and mediate the relationship between positive time attitudes and academic procrastination. The following reports the explanations and implications of these findings.

First, the Temporal Motivation Theory (Steel & König, 2006) and Time Decision Model of procrastination (Zhang & Feng, 2020; Zhang, Liu & Feng, 2019) hold that the primary purpose of procrastination is to reduce task aversiveness (Steel, 2007). When the deadline for a task is relatively long, the task unpleasantness will be reduced, which leads to procrastination. The make-up exams are now at the end of the winter holiday, nearly one month later (the winter holiday lasts for around one month in China). This long deadline certainly decreases the task aversiveness and executive motivation of middle school students (Zhang, Becker, et al., 2019), eventually triggering a great procrastination tendency to put off what needs to be done for as long as possible (Rosenbaum & Dettling, 2023). This serves as a reminder for education administrators to hold timely tests and exams during the teaching process. In this way, students might have higher motivation and prepare for the tests more urgently.

Second, a lack of self-control is a crucial mechanism for procrastination (Liu & Feng, 2017; Xu et al., 2021). Generally speaking, people who tend to procrastinate struggle with adaptive emotion regulation and place less value on the rewards of future outcomes. For example, they seldom use adaptive emotion regulation strategies (Eckert, et al., 2016), and focus more on short-term mood repair instead of long-term goals (Sirois & Pychyl, 2013). However, people with high self-control implement goal-congruent behaviours by effectively regulating associated negative feelings and modulating the value of each action. They attribute much more value to the benefits of long-term goals, which enables them to be stronger in motivation and execution (O’Leary, Uusberg & Gross, 2017). Hence, students with higher self-control manifested a lower tendency to procrastinate in this study. This is a warning to parents and teachers to encourage students’ self-control, so that they can be highly executive in the learning process.

Third, as a stable personality trait, time attitude predicts procrastination behaviour (Taylor & Wilson, 2016; Levasseur et al., 2020). When making decisions, people who have a positive expectation for future outcomes will regulate their current behaviour to seek long-term gratification (Berkman et al., 2017), which suggests the mediating role of self-control between time attitude and procrastination. This study offers supportive evidence for this mediating role. Chinese middle school students who hold a positive time attitude can appropriately choose beneficial actions in the long run (Kim et al., 2017), and plan more to achieve high self-regulation goals (Taylor & Wilson, 2016). Naturally, this high self-control plays a vital role in averting procrastination (Liu & Feng, 2017). As a result, self-control displays a significant mediating effect between positive time attitude and academic procrastination in both the questionnaire survey and the case study. The practical implication of this finding is that, in order to improve students’ learning experiences overall, we must not only help them develop a positive attitude toward their time but also help them learn how to exercise self-control.

This research has some limitations. Due to the multi-faceted nature of procrastination and time perception, this study obtained an inconsistent relationship between them in the prior questionnaire survey and the subsequent case study. Even though this happened in previous studies as well, we are nevertheless reminded of using a more comprehensive methodology to investigate these complex variables. Furthermore, middle schools announced the postponement of final exams abruptly. Therefore, this study was initiated with haste to collect data from this novel situation. The universality of our findings needs to be checked in future studies. Finally, the case study only concerns junior middle school students, and it would be better to include senior middle school students, too. However, we failed to get permission from the headteachers of senior middle schools. We hope to have more cooperation with front-line teachers in the future, offering them advice for teaching regulation and intervention.

Due to the abrupt lifting of lockdowns on December 6th, 2022, in China, middle schools postponed their final exams to the beginning of the next semester. This means middle school students had to prepare for the exams during the winter holiday. This unprecedented situation led us to wonder about students’ academic procrastination tendency: would they stick to the review plan for a satisfying performance in the coming exams, or be engaged in pleasant activities to welcome and celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year? At the same time, prior studies suggested that academic procrastination correlated with both time attitude and self-control, and time attitude predicted self-control. Therefore, this study proposed that self-control plays a mediating role in the relationship between academic procrastination and time attitude, and conducted research to verify this proposal within the context of this extraordinary winter holiday.

The results of both the questionnaire survey and the case study indicated that Chinese middle school students seriously delayed holiday assignments and displayed low self-control, and self-control significantly mediated the relationship between academic procrastination and all three positive time attitudes. This study reported the correlation between past time attitude and procrastination, compensating for the lack of the past time perspective in the existing research. Moreover, the discovered mediating role of self-control revealed how time attitude affects academic procrastination. Then, a case study and a questionnaire survey were combined to provide more convincing evidence from a variety of sources. Finally, this study contributed to the existing research on this topic with data from a novel context and a different social and cultural background.

Ethical Approval

The study was approved by the Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. All participants took part in the study voluntarily. All authors consent to publish the article in this journal.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Authors’ Contribution

Juanjuan Wang wrote the initial draft, and both Yi Sun and Juanjuan Wang reviewed the final version.

Funding

This paper was funded by the National Social Science Foundation Project “Cognitive Research on Multilingual Universal Figures of Speech from the perspective of Contemporary Metaphoralogy”(21BYY001), and the Research Program of Xi’an International Studies University in 2022 “The Interface between Metaphor and Metonymy Evidenced by Self-built Corpus Investigation and Psycholinguistic Experiments (22XWC09)”.

Availability of data and materials

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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No competing interests reported.

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Time Flies, but You’re in Control: the Mediating Effect of Self-control between Time Attitude and Academic Procrastination

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Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Related Studies

2.1 Procrastination

2.2 Time attitude

2.3 Self-control

3. Questionnaire Survey

4. A Case Study

5. General Discussion

6. Conclusion

Declarations

References

Additional Declarations

Supplementary Files

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