Student Procrastination on an E-learning Platform: From Individual Discounting to Group Behavior

Most applied research on delay discounting has focused on substance use disorders, eating, or gambling. In comparison, the issue of procrastination has received little interest from quantitative behavior analysts. In the present study, conducted on an e-learning platform, a group of 295 psychology students completed a series of four tests. The students could choose the day and hour on which they completed the tests, the deadline for each test being separated from the previous one by a period of 30 days. Most students completed the test in the last days before the deadline. The group response profile across days, reminiscent of fixed-interval scalloping, was well described formally by a hyperbola, replicating previous results by Howell et al. (2006). Also, the students' individual degree of procrastination showed stability across tests, in accordance with the notion of discounting as a persistent behavioral trait, and was negatively correlated with the students' grades. Finally, the shape of the scallop observed at the group level was consistent with a lognormal density of individual degrees of impulsivity, as measured by people's delay-discounting parameter.