From Intention to Automaticity: Daily Evidence of Habit Formation in Students’ Everyday Lives

Students’ recurring behaviors are central to academic, health, and well-being outcomes, yet educational psychology has placed less emphasis on habit formation than on motivation, metacognition, and deliberate self-regulation. This study used daily longitudinal data from a 10- to 12-week course-embedded habit project to test theoretically derived predictions about habit development in students’ everyday lives. Across five semesters, 175 students selected a habit they wanted to build and contributed 9,416 daily reports indicating whether they intended to enact the behavior, whether they did so, and how automatic the behavior felt. Students completed their selected behavior on 76.1% of intended days. Mixed-effects models supported two primary predictions: students reported stronger automaticity as they accumulated more prior repetitions, and stronger prior automaticity predicted a greater likelihood of completing the behavior on intended days. These patterns were robust across semesters and survey-completion thresholds. Secondary analyses suggested that weekends and spring break functioned as naturalistic disruptions, and success-profile analyses showed substantial variability in habit-formation outcomes across students. Together, the findings suggest that deliberate self-regulation and habit formation can operate as complementary processes: students selected and planned their behaviors, behaviors repeated more often felt more automatic, and behaviors that felt more automatic were more likely to be performed as intended. The study extends existing habit-formation evidence to students’ everyday academic, health, and well-being routines and supports more targeted future research on learning-related habits and educational outcomes.