Academic Procrastination, Self-Efficacy, and Academic Performance

Abstract

Academic procrastination refers to unnecessary delay in beginning or completing academic tasks despite anticipating negative consequences. Academic self-efficacy concerns students' beliefs about their capability to organize and perform actions required for academic success. This paper examines the relationships among academic procrastination, academic self-efficacy, and academic performance using a literature-based framework and an illustrative correlational study with synthetic data. Previous research indicates that procrastination is generally negatively associated with academic performance, although the magnitude of the relationship varies by measurement and context (Kim & Seo, 2015). Academic self-efficacy is generally positively associated with university students' academic performance, with effort regulation, learning strategies, and goal orientations acting as relevant factors (Honicke & Broadbent, 2016). Research directly examining the three variables has also reported negative associations between self-efficacy and procrastination and positive associations between self-efficacy and achievement (Güngör, 2020). Recent meta-analytic and systematic evidence continues to identify self-efficacy and self-regulation as important correlates of procrastination and academic success (Aslan & Terzi, 2026; Swain et al., 2026). In the illustrative dataset of 120 undergraduate students, academic procrastination showed a negative association with academic performance, whereas self-efficacy showed a positive association with performance. Multiple regression indicated that both predictors explained a substantial proportion of variance in academic performance. The findings support the importance of strengthening students' academic confidence, self-regulation, planning, and task-management skills. The numerical results are synthetic and intended only to demonstrate research-paper analysis.