The impact of academic procrastination behaviors of the students in the certificate program in English language teaching on their learning modalities and academic achievements

Learning style is personal characteristics of students which determine their preferences in perceiving the environment, processing information and communicating to their environment and reacting to it. Procrastination is defined as unnecessarily deferment of an action that should be done or have priority or leaving it to the last minute. This study analyzes the interaction among learning modalities, academic procrastination behaviors and academic achievements of the students participating in the Certificate Program in English Language Teaching delivered in the Faculty of Educational Science, Ankara University during the academic year 2008/09. It is found that there is no significant correlation between the academic achievement and academic procrastination, and learning modalities and academic achievement of the students. It is also seen that there is a significant positive correlation of .05 between learning modalities and academic procrastination behaviors of the students. This means that a course design based on the learning modalities of the students may result in a decrease in academic procrastination behaviors of the students and thereby an increase in the academic achievement. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.