Metacognitive Coaching for Reducing Academic Procrastination

Sarah Mitchell

Metacognitive Coaching for Reducing Academic Procrastination

Author(s)	Dr. Sarah Mitchell
Country	United States
Abstract	Academic procrastination is frequently interpreted as a problem of deficient motivation or ineffective time management, yet contemporary research increasingly identifies it as a multidimensional failure of self-regulation involving planning, monitoring, emotional regulation, effort control, self-efficacy, and metacognitive judgment. This study examines metacognitive coaching as a structured educational approach for helping university students recognize and modify the thinking and behavioral patterns that sustain academic delay. Steel's foundational meta-analysis conceptualized procrastination as a major self-regulatory failure, while Zhou, Lam, and Zhang's subsequent meta-analysis of 59 studies involving 23,627 participants identified a significant negative relationship between metacognitive processes and passive procrastination. The present study develops a coaching model organized around goal clarification, task diagnosis, implementation planning, self-monitoring, emotional awareness, strategy evaluation, and adaptive reflection. Because no genuine student intervention dataset was supplied, the quantitative component is explicitly simulation-based. A synthetic sample of 240 hypothetical university students was divided equally among comparison, planning-support, and metacognitive-coaching conditions. Mean simulated academic-procrastination scores declined from 64.4 to 40.5 in the metacognitive-coaching condition, compared with a decline from 66.5 to 54.0 under planning support and from 65.1 to 62.0 in the comparison condition. The post-intervention synthetic group difference was substantial (F = 103.14, p < .001), although this statistic describes the constructed dataset rather than an observed population effect. The study argues that metacognitive coaching can be conceptually distinguished from simple scheduling advice because it teaches students to identify why they delay, monitor emerging avoidance, evaluate strategy effectiveness, and deliberately modify responses to difficult academic tasks. The proposed framework offers a transparent foundation for future controlled intervention research while emphasizing that procrastination should be addressed through learner agency and self-regulatory development rather than moral judgment.
Keywords	academic procrastination; metacognitive coaching; self-regulated learning; metacognition; university students; academic self-efficacy; goal setting; learning strategies
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 3, Issue 5, September-October 2022
Published On	2022-10-17

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Metacognitive Coaching for Reducing Academic Procrastination

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