ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
Academic procrastination has emerged as a prevalent and persistent issue among college students, detrimentally impacting academic performance and contributing to various psychological problems, including anxiety, stress, and depression. Academic self-efficacy—a core psychological construct reflecting students’ confidence in their ability to manage academic tasks—has been identified as a critical determinant of learning behavior, influencing both cognitive strategies and behavioral choices. However, the precise nature of the relationship between academic self-efficacy and academic procrastination remains contested within the scholarly community. This study adopts a systematic review approach to examine the relationship and underlying mechanisms between these two constructs. A total of 13 peer-reviewed articles were retrieved from two major academic databases, EBSCOhost and Google Scholar. The review reveals a "conditional universality" of the inhibitory effect of academic self-efficacy on academic procrastination: 84.6% of the studies demonstrated a consistent cross-cultural pattern supporting the protective role of self-efficacy. Nevertheless, this relationship is moderated by contextual factors such as cultural values and task-specific characteristics. Furthermore, academic self-efficacy was found to influence procrastination through three primary mechanisms: emotional regulation, transformation of resource chains, and the activation of executive synergy networks. Based on these findings, the study proposes a context-sensitive intervention paradigm designed to enhance academic self-efficacy and reduce procrastination across diverse learning environments.
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