Academic Procrastination in University Students: Conscientiousness and Domain-Specific Executive Function Associations

Academic procrastination is a common and persistent difficulty in higher education and is widely conceptualized as a self-regulatory failure. Although conscientiousness is a robust predictor of procrastination, less is known about whether specific executive function (EF) components contribute to procrastinatory behavior beyond personality traits. The present study examined relationships among domain-specific EF, conscientiousness, academic procrastination, and academic performance indicators in 117 university students. Participants completed performance-based measures of EF (inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory), along with self-report measures of procrastination and conscientiousness. Academic performance indicators included cumulative grade point average (GPA) as an index of academic achievement, as well as behavioral indicators of task completion (i.e., late or missing coursework and incomplete assignments). Conscientiousness accounted for substantial variance in academic procrastination; however, EF showed a domain-specific association. Specifically, poorer cognitive flexibility was uniquely associated with higher levels of academic procrastination, whereas inhibition and working memory were not independently related once conscientiousness was considered. Academic procrastination was consistently associated with poorer academic performance indicators across both achievement and task-completion outcomes. Hierarchical analyses further indicated that academic performance reflected overlapping but non-identical associations with conscientiousness, selective EF components, and academic procrastination. These findings support a domain-specific approach to EF in the study of academic procrastination and underscore the value of moving beyond global accounts of EF in higher education contexts.