Relating Student Performance and Procrastination Behavior in Online Discussion Forums

Abstract

Procrastination is a behavioral feature in which a person chooses to delay a task or a decision. Academic procrastination is the tendency to postpone school-related obligations despite known negative consequences. In this paper, we examine how procrastination manifests in online discussion forum participation in a university in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. We visualize how high- and low-performing students differ in the rate at which they respond to discussion forum prompts. We also make use of association rule mining in order to determine which student behaviors are antecedents of procrastination. We find that most highperforming students tend to respond to discussion forum prompts much earlier than most lowperforming students. This implies that they procrastinate less. We also found that making initial accesses or posts later or no graded posts at all makes the student at risk for poor performance.