Various tasks compete for students’ time, failure to achieve all results in attending to some and abandoning others. This behaviour known as academic procrastination lead to psychological distress and poor performance among undergraduates. Prior studies focused on its causative agents with scanty attention paid to the prevention and reduction. This study therefore, investigated Coherence psychotherapy (CP) and self-regulation training (SRT) in the reduction of academic procrastination (AP) among undergraduates in South-west Nigeria. The moderating effects of attributional styles and emotional intelligence were also determined. Pretest-posttest, control group, experimental design with a 3x2x3 factorial matrix was adopted. Simple random sampling technique was used to select three federal-owned universities. One hundred and nine undergraduates who scored above 60.0% in the screening exercise were randomly assigned to CP(34), SRT (39) and control (36) groups. The treatment lasted 10 weeks. Four instruments were used for data collection. Seven hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data were analysed using ANCOVA and Scheffe post-hoc test. There were significant main effects of treatment on AP (F2, 106 = 5.46, ?2 =.107). There were also reduction in the mean scores of participants in CP and SRT compared to the control groups. There was also a significant main effect of attributional styles on AP (F1, 107 = 9.689, ?2 =.096). Participants with internal attributional style displayed lower AP tendencies than those with external attributional style. Counselling psychologists would find these therapies useful in treating students experiencing academic procrastination.

Authors: Beatrice Iyabo Komolafe, David Akinlolu Adeyemo

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2015)

• Date of Conference: 9-11 November 2015
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2015.0057
• ISBN: 978-1-908320-55-1
• Conference Location: Heathrow Windsor Marriott Hotel, London, UK