Blogging Pedagogy

A team of psychologists from several universities recently conducted a study of procrastination in undergraduates. They wanted to find out if how you think about a task affects your willingness to actually tackle it. The original article (EID required) is written in rather abstruse psychologists' lingo, but the gist of it is that people who thought about a task in concrete terms -- for example, by listing the steps they would need to take in order to accomplish it -- tended to procrastinate less than people who thought about the task in the abstract.

The gist? Perhaps, in order to help our students (and ourselves!) manage time better, we ought to be encouraging them to write specific, detailed plans for when and how they'll do the work, early in the process.

Here's a full citation for the original article:

McCrea, S. M., Liberman, N., Trope, Y., & Sherman, S. J. (2008). Construal Level and Procrastination. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1308-1314. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02240.x.