Procrastination among post-16 students: how is it experienced and how can we reduce it? The views of students, teachers and educational psychologists.

Abstract Background Academic procrastination has been defined as the voluntarily delay of an intended course of study-related action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. As many as 70% of university students consider themselves procrastinators, and approximately 50% of university students procrastinate consistently and problematically. Despite this, research concerning the prevalence and prevention of procrastination among post-16 students in the UK is scarce. Temporal motivation theory (TMT) is one way to better understand procrastination because it helps explain why motivation grows exponentially as deadlines approach. TMT can be expressed mathematically as motivation = (expectancy x value) / (impulsiveness x delay). The current study was carried out in two phases. A mixed-methods approach to data collection and analysis was adopted using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I have summarised each phase below. Phase 1 Research Questions 1. How does procrastination as experienced by post-16 students compare with procrastination as described by temporal motivation theory? 2. How do post-16 students’ strategies for tackling procrastination compare with procrastination as described by temporal motivation theory? Methods Semi-structured interviews were carried out with twenty post-16 students to explore their lived experience of procrastination. Four case studies were employed to help elicit their responses. The students were then asked to outline approaches which might help other young people reduce procrastination behaviours. Template analysis (TA) was used to analyse the participants’ responses. Three original templates were drawn up to analyse participants’ responses in terms of how procrastination was defined, how it was described, and how it might be reduced. The original templates included the constructs making up TMT as a priori themes. These templates were then adapted and additional themes added. The extent to which the original templates were adapted showed the extent to which TMT accounted for the breadth of participants’ responses. Results TMT was found to be a useful way to explain how students approach a procrastination task. However, the components of TMT were found to interact in a number of important ways, resulting in different types of procrastination behaviour. Emotions were also shown to motivate cognition, with anxious feelings exaggerating the perceived cost of a procrastination task. Furthermore, students did not consider procrastination tasks in isolation, and aspects of TMT could be used to help determine whether they prioritised procrastination tasks, or alternative tasks. Lastly, TMT appeared to be a useful framework for planning interventions to tackle procrastination. However, TMT may not be a sufficient framework in and of itself. Phase 2 Research Questions 1. To what extent are the Phase One results generalisable to post-16 students? 2. To what extent do teachers and educational psychologists agree with the views of post-16 students about procrastination and temporal motivation theory? Methods Surveys were designed to capture the constructs which emerged during Phase One. Post-16 students (n=343), teachers of post-16 students (n=52), and educational psychologists (n=43) completed these surveys. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVAs) and appropriate post hoc tests were used to analyse the perceived importance of each construct. Relevant contrasts and comparisons are outlined in the text. Results Statistical analysis suggested that many of the Phase One results were generalisable. There were important areas where all three cohorts agreed. For example – regarding the role of deadlines in procrastination. However, some significant differences were also observed. These included a difference in opinion about the value of alternative tasks; a greater value placed on smartphones by students; and a more negative evaluation of procrastination tasks by students. Lastly, there were some results which were too subtle to be picked up using the Phase Two survey (in relation to complacency, for example). Overall discussion and future directions Different aspects of the TMT equation interact – along with emotion – to produce different patterns of avoidance. For example, low expectancy-beliefs result in negative emotions, especially when accompanied by high evaluations of task cost. Similarly, anxious feelings may lead to an exaggerated perception of the cost of a procrastination task, which may be why starting a procrastination task is especially difficult. This may also be why it is so easy to get distracted beforehand. Moreover, the utility value of a procrastination task is often set in opposition to the high intrinsic value of alternative tasks. These conflicts can result in distress and anxiety. In terms of practical implications, adopting practical strategies requires self-regulation in and of itself, and the subjective experience of low expectancy beliefs seems to make following practical advice problematic. It is also worth taking seriously the idea that this generation of students are at a particular disadvantage given their exposure to mobile technology. Future interventions might therefore tackle the regulation side of procrastination. In these cases, teachers and other professionals might support students with timetables, SMART targets, and intermittent deadlines. However, all three groups also agreed that decreasing the negative emotions associated with a task might help reduce procrastination. Support for students could therefore be targeted at the emotional aspect of procrastination. Approaches such as mindfulness, CBT and ACT may be helpful. Finally, some future directions are also suggested. For example, a better understanding of how STVs are deployed to rank tasks, and what the emotional cost is for making these judgements. A role for EPs in supporting each group to understand procrastination and the different ways that it can be perceived is also suggested

Performance Guide and Recording of Three Twenty-First-Century Compositions for Solo Cello

The twenty-first century boasts a vast repertoire of solo cello pieces. While many editions might feature phrase markings and other performance indications by the composer, they rarely include bowing indications, fingerings, and other practical advice. Due to the diversity and sometimes technical difficulty of the twenty-first-century solo cello repertoire, most new works now include guidelines or performance guides written by the composer or first performer. I have selected three pieces according to the following criteria: no performance guide is currently available; the published score lacks editorial guidance on performance issues such as bowing and fingering; and no commercially available recording has yet been released. These three pieces are: Lera Auerbach’s La Suite dels Ocells (Suite of the birds), Olli Mustonen’s Frei, aber einsam (Free, but lonely), and Giovanni Sollima’s La Folia. This document provides valuable background information about the above-mentioned composers and their compositions, a performance guide with fingerings and bowings for the works selected for this study, interviews with the composers and the cellists who gave the world premiere of these works, and recordings of these pieces. I have also compiled what aims to be a complete catalog of all published works for solo cello written between 2000 and 2020

Time Matters: Temporally Enacted Frame-Works in Narrative Accounts of Mediation

Bateson\u27s (1979) method of double description is utilized to examine narrative accounts of participants\u27 mediation experiences, as a way to investigate significant change events. Comparing what changes to what remains more stable suggests that temporal differences are an indicator of contextualization, providing a framework for how meaning is made meaningful. Case studies of two of these structured interview transcripts are intensively analyzed, with triangulating measures of different logical type. Specifically, these include narrative analysis of key story points, temporal analysis of the frequency and distribution of in vivo codes to yield repetitive themes, and a modified lag analysis of codes in joint proximity to yield reliable thematic clusters. Results are integrated by means of grounded theory procedures of open and axial coding, arriving at semi-saturated categories dealing with temporal enactment of meaning-making. A lexicon of temporal devices for the social construction of common frames of reference between speaker and listener is developed. These are partitioned into three types of temporal progression (i.e., sequence, episodic structure, and co-occurrence) and three types of temporal duration (i.e., repetition, framing, and selection/deselection). Defining conditions and exemplars of each are provided, along with further permutations, including transposition, chained incidents, rival narratives, adjacency, inclusio, asymmetrical bracketing, and chiasm. These provide varied narrative solutions to address the limited attentional focus of a listener. An initial hypothesis—that longer duration meanings contextualize shorter—is given provisional support, in that it appears useful to construct and compare relative durations, with longer duration lying deeper in a hierarchy of logical types. A second hypothesis—that an increase in duration means an increase in perceived significance—is not sustained, in that deselection (and thereby decreasing a meaning\u27s duration) can nonetheless be a significant vehicle for therapeutic change. The study amounts to building a set of tautological linkages that “time matters,” and mapping descriptive territories such as narrative accounts onto it, with resulting increments in explanatory understanding. It is shown how participants shaped their accounts via temporality, by selecting themes, contextualizing, repeating, grouping, ordering, and weaving into stories. The tautology is reflexively applied to itself, and avenues for future theoretical sampling are suggested

Delayed Binary Search, or Playing Twenty Questions with a Procrastinator

We study the classic binary search problem, with a delay between query and answer. For all constant delays, we give matching upper and lower bounds on the number of queries. Key Words: binary search, delay, Fibonacci series, Golden Ratio, monotone, search with apologies to [1] y Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Email: [email protected]. z Department of Math & Computer Science, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530. Email: [email protected]. x Barclays Global Investors, 45 Fremont Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Email: [email protected]. 1 Introduction and Definitions Recently one of us (S. Bloch) found himself talking with a colleague about how to match homework assignments to the intellectual level of an unknown group of students. An obvious algorithm appeared to be binary search: once a range of possible difficulty levels has been determined, divide it in half (assuming some reasonable metric on homework difficulty) and..