An exploratory study of the coping behaviours of student doing last minute school work.

Title : An exploratory study of the coping behaviours of student doing last minute school work.

Conducted by : Nicholas Lee Chee Wee (P0715670, DBS/FT/2B21), Ho Su Jun Christina (P0723787, DCP2B21), Shon Boon Ling (P0757849, DIT2B21), Pei Chew Mui (P0744089, DPFM2A02), Chai Yit Hoong (P0746841, DEEE/FT/1B/28), Michelle Chong Hui Shan (P0707761, DAC/FT/2A/03), Shi Xiang (P0652267, DGDD/FT/3A/01)


AIM OF STUDY
The aim of this study is to answer the main research question as below:
Why do students choose to do last minute school work?

This main research question is fragmented into the following sub questions:
a) What are the causes (influence) of delaying school work?
b) What are the consequences of delaying school work?
c) When do they start delaying their school work? (habit)

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS METHODS

This study employs a qualitative social-psychological research paradigm. The research is conducted in a polytechnic in the western part of Singapore. The research takes a total of four weeks to complete. The research stretches from 4th July 2008 to 25th July 2008.

The forms of data collection for the research are as below:
a) Selected informal open-ended interviews of 16 students taking an average of 15 minutes per interviews.

The forms of analysis used are as follow:
a) Open Coding.
b) Noting relations between variables
c) Clustering

FINDINGS
The findings for this research are as follows:
a) The causes that lead to students doing their assignment last minute are as follow:


Difficulty of the assignment
Students look at the difficulty of the assignment to decide if they want to do the work early or last minute. This could be because they do not understand the assignment aspects or their lessons. However, towards the dateline of the assignment, students will be left with no choice but to complete the assignment. This assignment could be rushed through or copied from others.

Weight-age of assignment
Students look at the contribution of the percentage towards to the entire module. Assignments which have a higher weight-age are often more highly regarded by students; while assignments with a lower weight-age are less regarded. When the assignments are highly regarded, students will put set aside more time for it

Interest towards work
Students tend to work in accordance towards their interest in a particular module. For example, they will put in more time and effort into a module which they are interested in, as compared to one module which they have got no interest in.

Peer Influence
Individuals may be influence by their peers. For example, when the majority of the classmates do not start their assignments early, the minority will tend to go with the flow.

Other commitments
From the interviews, students are often engaged in other commitments such as Co-Curriculum Activities (CCA), boy-girl relationships (BGR), and part-time job. These commitments have higher priority than school assignments. This causes them to push assignments to a later date and doing them when the datelines are nearer.
Distractions
Students tend to neglect their work and participate in other leisure activities such as gaming, surfing the internet, watching television, hanging out with friends, etc.


b) The consequences of delaying school work

Lack of Sleep
Occurrence of careless mistakes
Stress
Remorseful
Under performance
Tendency to neglect other assignments of lower weight-age
Trapped in a vicious cycle of doing last minute assignment (heavy workload)

When assignments start to accumulate, students will feel stress and burn midnight oil to complete their assignments. This causes them to have a lack of sleep, which in turn may lead to more occurrences of careless mistakes and thus under perform. The students may then feel remorseful as because they could have achieved quality work if they did not do last minute work.

Also, when there are 2 assignments of different weight-age due on the same deadline, students will tend to focus on the assignment with higher weight-age and neglect the other assignments.

This scenario will keep occurring if more work (with deadline nearing to the current assignment) is introduced into their existing workload and thus the students are trapped in this vicious cycle.


c) When do they start delaying their school work? (habit)
1. Attitude towards work
The attitude towards work largely constitute to their choice of doing their assignments last minute. Students tend to do their work when they feel like to. Comments such as “I do not have the mood” are commonly used as excuses. Students who hold the apathetic attitude tend to leave their work undone.

Three categories of coping behaviours employed by students doing last minute work evolve from this study. They are named as the categories of procrastinating behaviours, delusive behaviours and resistant behaviours respectively in this study. This answers the first, second and third sub research question for this study.

i) Procrastinating Behaviours
Procrastinating behaviours are subdivided into self procrastinating behaviours and group procrastinating behaviours.
Self-procrastinating behaviours
Delayed action in doing assignment
Such students tend to always put aside their work with or without doing it, until the deadline is approaching. The excuses they gave are always ‘I have no mood to do’, ‘I don’t know how to do’ or ‘Still got so much time’ and etc…

Group procrastinating behaviours
Doing non assignment related activities
Such students tend to procrastinate in a group (friends, classmates...), they will put aside their assignments and do it at another date or somewhere near deadline. They tend to do a bit of their work first, but after some time, they will start doing other stuff and progress to not wanting to do the assignment anymore.

ii) Delusive Behaviours
Delusive behaviours are divided broadly into two subcategories- self-deluding behaviours and teacher deluding behaviours.

Self Deluding Behaviours
Refusal to admit doing last minute work is wrong
Students will blame other events, such as too many assignments thus giving them no choice but to do last minute work. The fault lies in the lecturers who are flooding them with assignments instead of themselves for the poor time management. Students will also think that doing last minute work is correct and they will reaffirm it when asked about doing last minute work. Thus, they will keep doing last minute work, it become like a habit. They tend to give reasons like ‘it helps me focuses, ‘there’s no difference from starting the work early’ and etc. Some even thought that doing last minute work, have a better quality than doing the work in a earlier time.

Self affirmation
Reduce the impact of a dissonance- arousing threat to their self-concept by focusing on and affirming their competence on some dimension unrelated to the threat. Such students when they are dragging the school work will tell oneself that he still has the time; the deadline for the work to submit is still long.

Teacher Deluding Behaviours
Deliberate deadline changing
Students may request to change the dead line of the assignment, giving excuses like forgotten the dead line of the assignment thus the assignment could not be submitted on the actual day to support their stand.

Faking illness, giving excuses
Students will give fictional excuse such as illness, funeral, etc as reason forcing them to do last minute assignments. Students will also pretend to be sick to skip lesson giving them one extra day to do the work. They will tell the lecturers that they cannot come on that day, so they can only hand it in today. Indirectly, they postponed the deadline of the assignment



Copying of assignment from others
Students not only not do their assignment till the last minute, but many also copy their assignments from their friends at the last possible minute. They tend to unthinkingly shift their attention to their peers’ answers and copy immediately from them. This action is almost automatic to such students observed. Some of them choose to copy as their peers are still in the process of doing while the others prefer to copy only when their peers have finished the assignment. All these actions are performed discreetly outside the view of the teacher.

iii) Resistant Behaviours
Resistant behaviours are categorised into two groups – independent resistance and influencing resistance.

Independent Resistance
Failure to bring assignment
Such students will claim that they forget to bring their due assignment. They are usually unapologetic about it. They also do care about the admonishments or punishments meted to them.

Deliberately skip lesson
Such students will skip the lesson where they have to hand in their assignment, so that they have one more day to do the assignment. They are also ready to take any admonishments or punishments meted out by the teacher.

Influencing Resistance
Promoting others to hand in together
Students will try to promote their friends/classmates to hand in together/as a class together, applying peer pressure, and nudging on their slacker personality hidden inside of them. This will lead to a large bunch of students handing in their work late together.

DISCUSSION
From a social psychological viewpoint, habit of doing last minute work arises because of their attitudes towards assignment and workloads. Teachers, who are unhelpful and unconcerned to the needs of these students, can further their attitude towards doing last minute work. As these students continued to keep doing last minute work, they begin to feel that it is a social norm to do last minute work. In the long run, they will feel that it’s alright doing last minute work. This greatly reduces their self efficacy of learning. The whole purpose of doing assignment is thus changed to ‘just finish it’ kind of mentality. They missed out the learning experiences from doing the assignment properly. Also, as our education system teaches us that doing last minute work is wrong. To counter such unpleasant feelings caused by cognitive dissonance, they begin to engage in coping behaviours that aim to delude. This is because such coping behaviours are psychologically fruitful to them than to engage in changing their perspective and habit which requires a lot of effort, time and self-discipline.


Conclusion
Many students in Singapore have this bad habit of waiting till the last minute before rushing out their assignments, this is a very worrying trend that has plagued schools and institutions around the island and with none of them spared. This trend has the potential of wrecking the lives of the youths who are engaging in this sort of activities with many of them getting poor results as a direct consequence for their bad habit. With this bad results, many of them then proceed to ruin their future career options .Also many students because of them rushing their assignments, are unable to understand the subject well and thus lead to them struggling and lost when the lecturer moves on to more deeper topics.

In addition this may in turn affect the student health as they had to burn midnight oil just to complete their work. Thus In order to provide the most effective solution to a problem, there is a need to understand the problem thoroughly. From this study, three categories of coping behaviours of students doing last minute work evolve. They are the categories of procrastinating behaviours, delusive behaviours and resistant behaviours.

By knowing the behaviours, lecturers can have a better understanding of the students and help to solve the problem. However if the lecturers choose to ignore this, the trend of students waiting till the last minute before rushing out their assignment will continue and getting worse.