Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Procrastination is a strong predictor of academic performance

I believe that perseverance and timeliness are the secret to success, and foremost so in school. And I believe these are the qualities that brought me to where I am now, and I hope these qualities have also transpired on this blog. But ,y belief may not be general wisdom or even scientifically established. Thus, I am happy to report on a study that confirms at least part of my credo.

Marco Novarese and Viviana Di Giovinazzo use data on how promptly astudents have enrolled for university to forecast their future academic performance, and the forecast is quite good. Of course, promptness likely correlates with plenty of other positive student characteristics the authors cannot measure. And of course, the result is not too surprising. But I feel comforted in my belief and my bias in selecting studies that confirm my prejudices is thus reinforced.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, there are actually many studies on that topic that have much better measures of time preferences. For instance, Golsteyn et al show that early measured time preferences correlate with many long term outcomes such as lifetime income. See http://ftp.iza.org/dp7165.pdf

Anonymous said...

Indeed the aim of our paper is mainly that of proposing a new possibile indicator of procrastination and motivation.

Thanks for the interest!

Viviana and Marco