Using Tests as an Incentive to Motivate Procrastinators to Study

The purposes of this study were to compare two approaches for enhancing the recall and understanding of text and to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches for students differing in procrastination tendency. The first approach was to provide incentive motivation by giving a test on each text chapter; the second approach was to provide a learning strategy by requiring students to outline each chapter as a homework assignment. Eighty-two students were classified by level of procrastination based on scores on the Procrastination Scale. Half of the students experienced the test condition; the other half experienced the homework condition. Although the test condition produced significantly higher scores overall on a final achievement examination than the outline condition did, a significant interaction between condition and student procrastination level reflected an almost 12% advantage for the test condition among high procrastinators. There was virtually no difference between conditions for medium and low procrastinators.