Systematic Review of Academic Procrastination Interventions in Computing Higher Education

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes recent empirical studies on interventions to reduce academic procrastination in computing higher education, emphasizing structured, supportive, and personalized approaches for better student outcomes.

Contribution

It synthesizes evidence from 19 studies, highlighting effective intervention strategies and their impact on student performance and task engagement.

Findings

Structured interventions promote earlier and more distributed work.

Long-horizon tasks benefit more from structured interventions.

Supportive designs outperform punitive schemes.

Abstract

Academic procrastination is a persistent challenge in computing education, yet evidence on the effectiveness of course-level interventions remains fragmented across diverse designs and contexts. We present a systematic literature review of studies published in the past decade that empirically examine interventions to reduce academic procrastination among post-secondary computing students. Evidence from 19 articles examines interventions that target procrastination through structural, feedback-based, motivational, and self-regulatory mechanisms. Our findings suggest that interventions introducing clear temporal structure consistently promote earlier starts and more distributed work, which act as key mediators of performance gains. The magnitude of these gains depends strongly on task structure, with greater benefits for long-horizon, multi-step assignments than for short, routine tasks. Moreover, supportive designs reliably outperform punitive or restrictive schemes, while uniform interventions yield uneven benefits across students. This review highlights the importance of designing structured, supportive, and personalized interventions to address procrastination in computing education.