Methods
Methods
Participants
Participants included 165 (MAge = 18.76, SD = .98); 38 male, 108 female, 1 transgender, 18 unreported) undergraduate college students (12 African/Black, 4 American (or African), 1 Asian Pacific Islander American, 121 Caucasian/White American (or European), 3 Hispanic/Latin American, 6 Bi or multi-racial, 18 unreported).
Procedure
Participants filled out surveys as part of a larger study on sleep and academic performance. They were sent two separate surveys over the course of four days and filled out the measures listed below as well as a series of demographic questions.
Measures
Procrastination Scale (Tuckman, 1991): The PS is a 20-item measure of procrastination tendencies (“I often find myself performing tasks that I had intended to do days before”) rated on a 5-point Likert scale with higher scores indicating greater procrastination tendencies (α = .85).
The GRIT Scale (Duckworth et al., 2007): The GRIT is a 12-item measure of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, separated into the two subscales of perseverance of effort and consistency of interest. The current study utilized the 6-item subscale of perseverance of effort (“I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge”) rated on a 5-point Likert scale with higher scores indicating greater perseverance of effort (α = .75).
Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST; Tait et al., 1998): The ASSIST is a 52-item measure of student approaches to studying and learning styles. The current study used four subscales (16-items) for strategic approaches to learning, including the subscales: organized studying, time management, alertness to assessment demands, and achieving (“I usually plan out my week’s work in advance, either on paper or in my head”) rated on a 5-point Likert scale with higher scores indicating greater use of strategic approaches to learning (α = .86).
Analysis
Correlations were examined to determine a relationship between the variables of interest prior to conducting the mediation analysis consistent with Baron & Kenny’s (1986) requirements for mediation. Independent t-tests were used to test for potential gender differences on strategic learning based on previous research which suggests differences in academic performance (Voyer & Voyer, 2014). A simple mediation analysis using PROCESS (Hayes, 2017) with a 5,000 bootstrapped sample was used to test procrastination as a mediator of the relationship between perseverance and strategic approaches to learning.