Computers and Education Open (Dec 2022)
The learning process matter: A sequence analysis perspective of examining procrastination using learning management system
Abstract
While procrastination has been found as a crucial indicator that negatively affects performance, no research has investigated using a learning management system (LMS) to formulate a learning typology based on daily learning patterns, grouping students into distinct clusters showing procrastination does affect performance via sequence analysis. This new-fangled approach, shifts away from using an inventory to measure procrastination that avoids self-report bias, poor recall, measurement errors, and researcher selection bias, to directly examining the learning pattern of students based on the exact time acts of procrastination. The findings confirmed the negative effect of academic learning procrastination but also surprisingly found that students who were delayed in their submission were positively related to performance. A relative conception of procrastination is proposed to explain the acts of executing procrastination. An analytical framework with a multimodal emphasis is recommended and outlined for studying procrastination that focuses on sequence analysis as the core model for online education research. The findings also discovered that students strategically used certain studying tactics over time to improve their learning which affects performance that could be discovered from the LMS. These strategies include varying their time length in studying, learning at a specific time of the day & day of the week, and practicing an appropriate launching time length for online learning. As the study was carried out during the COVID-19 period when all the students were restricted to online study, it provided empirical evidence of students in a completely online environment, a baseline for planning future online courses.