Systematic Review of Academic Procrastination Interventions in Computing Higher Education

A research team including Daniel Cheng, Alice Gao, and four other authors has published a systematic literature review titled 'Systematic Review of Academic Procrastination Interventions in Computing Higher Education' on arXiv. The paper synthesizes evidence from 19 empirical studies published over the past decade that examine interventions designed to reduce procrastination among university-level computing students. The review categorizes interventions into four types: structural, feedback-based, motivational, and self-regulatory mechanisms.

The core finding is that interventions introducing clear temporal structure—such as staged deadlines or progress checkpoints—consistently help students start assignments earlier and distribute their work more evenly. These behavioral changes act as key mediators for subsequent performance improvements. The effectiveness of an intervention depends heavily on the task structure itself, with long-horizon, complex assignments (like multi-step projects) showing greater benefits from anti-procrastination designs than short, routine tasks. Furthermore, the evidence strongly indicates that supportive, enabling intervention designs reliably yield better outcomes than punitive or restrictive schemes. The review also notes that uniform interventions often produce uneven benefits across a diverse student population, highlighting a need for more personalized approaches in computing education.