The impact of procrastination, self-efficacy, and motivation on academic performance of undergraduates in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Introduction

Education ensures the quality of living standards; sustainable development goals are key driving factors which help to protect educational levels globally. In today’s world the competitive environment, advancing technology and growing economy require a good level of education to even achieve basic human needs. Out of the 17 sustainable goals, the fourth sustainable development goal is archiving quality education (Thomson, 2019). As a developing country ensuring quality education is vital for Sri Lanka. Therefore, enhancing academic performance of undergraduates is one of the key requirements for the development of Sri Lanka. With focus on personality traits, private universities are belived to offer scope for quality education. Measuring academic performance in a university context relating to academic personality traits is more convenient with the Grade Point Average system which was targeted in previous research. Academic procrastination can be defined as a person voluntarily postponing intended activities regardless of the consequences of the delay.

Academic procrastination is of two types, active and passive procrastination. Passive procrastinators procrastinate because they lack the ability to do the task. Active procrastinators get involved in it because they invest time and do the task efficiently. Active procrastinators have a positive impact and passive procrastinators have a negative impact on academic performance. Academic motivation is one of the powerful factors which leads undergraduates to gain more interest in learning and to contribute more time to studying willingly. Without any interest, no one would do anything which takes their time. So motivation is the factor which drives undergraduates to sacrifice their time for academic activities which leads to better academic performance. However, there is no previous research related to this field in Sri Lanka. This is an attempt to focus on the success of education by identifying the impact from three personality traits which are academic procrastination, academic self-efficacy, and academic motivation on academic performance.