Article

Validation of the Short Psychological Reports

2016, Vol. 118(1) 171–179
Form of the Academic ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0033294115626825
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Ronald D. Yockey
California State University, Fresno, USA

Abstract
The factor structure, internal consistency reliability, and convergent validity of the
five-item Academic Procrastination Scale–Short Form was investigated on an ethnic-
ally diverse sample of college students. The results provided support for the
Academic Procrastination Scale–Short Form as a unidimensional measure of aca-
demic procrastination, which possessed good internal consistency reliability in this
sample of 282 students. The scale also demonstrated good convergent validity, with
moderate to large correlations with both the Procrastination Assessment Scale–
Students and the Tuckman Procrastination Scale. Implications of the results are dis-
cussed and recommendations for future work provided.

Keywords
Academic Procrastination, Validation Study, Academic Procrastination Scale, Factor
Analysis

Procrastination is very common among college students, with 95% to 99% of

students identifying themselves as procrastinators (Ellis & Knaus, 1977; Day,
Mensink, & O’Sullivan, 2000), and between 32% and 46% of students procras-
tinating in a chronic manner (Solomon & Rothblum, 1984; Clark & Hill, 1994).
This is important, as procrastination has been found to be negatively related to
examination scores and grades, and positively related to symptoms of stress,
depression, visits to medical professionals, course withdrawal, and course failure
(Solomon & Rothblum, 1984; Tice & Baumeister, 1997; Doherty, 2006).
Given both the prevalence of procrastination among college students and its
potential adverse effects, having psychometrically sound measures of procras-
tination is critical. While a number of scales exist for measuring procrastination

Corresponding Author:
Ronald D. Yockey, Department of Psychology, California State University, Fresno, 2576 E. San Ramon
ST 11, Fresno, CA 93740, USA.
Email: ryockey@csufresno.edu
172 Psychological Reports 118(1)

in general, including both univariate (Lay, 1986; Tuckman, 1991) and multivari-
ate (e.g., Chu & Choi, 2005) measures, only a handful of scales are available that
were specifically designed for measuring procrastination on academic tasks. This
is important, since much work on procrastination focuses on the academic set-
ting (e.g., Bridges & Roig, 1997; Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Klassen, Krawchuk, &
Rajani, 2008). Two of the more commonly used scales to measure procrastin-
ation in the academic setting are the Procrastination Assessment Scale–Students
(PASS; Solomon & Rothblum, 1984) and the Tuckman Procrastination Scale
(Tuckman, 1991). The 12-item PASS, which has been cited as the most com-
monly used measure of academic procrastination (Ferrari, Johnson, &
McCown, 1995; Harrington, 2005) focuses on procrastination on specific types
of academic tasks (e.g., term papers, examinations, weekly readings, adminis-
trative academic-related tasks), and has been shown to possess fairly good esti-
mates of reliability and validity. The 16-item Tuckman Scale, while consisting
predominantly of items that measure general rather than academic procrastin-
ation, is commonly used in academic settings and possesses good estimates of
reliability and validity.
One scale recently developed to measure procrastination specifically in the
academic setting is the Academic Procrastination Scale (APS; McCloskey,
2011). While both the APS and PASS consist predominantly of items pertaining
to the academic setting, the APS was designed with a focus on measuring general
academic procrastination, with less emphasis on specific types of academic tasks,
such as procrastinating while writing a term paper. In a validation study on 622
participants, McCloskey (2011) found that the full-length 25 Likert-type item
APS (a) showed a very good internal consistency reliability estimate (a ¼ .94),
(b) had good convergent validity, with moderate to high correlations with other
procrastination measures such as the PASS and Tuckman Scale, and (c) con-
sisted of one predominant component, accounting for approximately 43% of the
variance. While the full-length version of the APS showed promising psycho-
metric properties, because both the scale is fairly long at 25 items and several
items on the scale were highly similar, McCloskey (2011) also proposed a shorter
five-item version of the scale, selecting items from the full-length scale that had
some of the most promising psychometric properties (i.e., item-total correlations
greater than .70).
While the full-length version of the APS showed promising psychometric
properties in the initial study by McCloskey (2011), to the best of the author’s
knowledge, the reliability and validity of the short form of the scale have yet to
be investigated in an undergraduate sample. Investigating the short form of the
scale is important because, while longer length measures of procrastination exist
(e.g., 18-item Tuckman scale, 12-item PASS, 20-item Lay procrastination scale;
Lay, 1986), a more parsimonious 5-item scale, particularly one that focuses on
academic tasks, would provide researchers with an efficient option for assessing
academic procrastination in their studies.
Yockey 173

Research goal. To investigate the psychometric properties of the Academic

Procrastination Scale–Short Form (APS-S); specifically, the reliability, conver-
gent validity, and factorial validity of the five-item scale were investigated using
an ethnically diverse sample of college students.

Method
Participants
The short form of the APS-S was administered to a sample of 284 students (71%
female, n ¼ 201; M age ¼ 22.6 yr., SD ¼ 3.9, range ¼ 18 to 47) at a university in
the Western United States. The sample was ethnically diverse, with 42%
(n ¼ 120) reporting as Hispanic, 29% (n ¼ 81) Caucasian, 12% (n ¼ 35) Asian
American, 7% (n ¼ 19) African American, and 10% (n ¼ 28) “other”. Along
with completing the short form of the APS-S, participants also completed
either the Tuckman Procrastination Scale (Tuckman, 1991) or the PASS.

Measures
The PASS is a 12-item five-point Likert-type scale that measures the frequency
with which students procrastinate on specific types of academic tasks, includ-
ing term papers, examinations, and reading assignments. For the 12-item scale,
respondents are asked the following two questions in each of six different
areas: “To what degree do you procrastinate on this task,” (anchors 1:
Never procrastinate, and 5: Always procrastinate) and “To what degree is
procrastination on this task a problem for you?” (anchors 1: Not at all a
problem, and 5: Always a problem). Possible scores on the PASS range
from 12 to 60, with higher scores indicating a greater tendency to procrastin-
ate. Onwuegbuzie (2004) reported an internal consistency estimate of .84 for
the PASS on a sample of 135 graduate students, and total scores have been
found to correlate positively with measures of depression and irrational cog-
nitions, and negatively with measures of self-esteem and punctuality (Solomon
& Rothblum, 1984).
The Tuckman Procrastination Scale is a 16-item measure of procrastination.
Sample items include “I needlessly delay jobs, even when they’re important,”
and “I always finish important jobs with time to spare.” Possible responses range
from 1: “That’s me for sure,” to 4: “That’s not me for sure.” Total possible
scores range from 16 to 64, with higher scores indicating a greater tendency to
engage in procrastination. Tuckman (1991) reported a Cronbach’s a of .90 in his
original work, with estimates of .89 and .92 reported in other samples
(Tuckman, 1998, 2005). The validity of the scale has been supported through
exploratory factor analyses as well as a correlation of r ¼ .54 between the
Tuckman scores and a measure of self-regulation (Tuckman, 1991).
174 Psychological Reports 118(1)

Finally, the APS-S (McCloskey, 2011) is a five-item Likert-type scale with

anchors 1: Agree to 5: Disagree, with the items for the short form of the scale
originally selected from the 25-item full length scale. Instructions for competing
the scale consisted of asking participants “How much do you, yourself agree to
the following statements?” (p. 57; McCloskey, 2011). Higher scores on the scale
indicate a greater tendency to procrastinate on academic tasks. Based on a
sample of 622 participants, McCloskey (2011) reported an internal consistency
reliability estimate of .93 for the full-length scale. Significant correlations were
reported for the full-length APS-S with other measures of procrastination,
including the Tuckman Scale (r ¼ .70) and the PASS (r ¼ .53). The full-length
APS was also negatively correlated with conscientiousness (r ¼ .57) and, using
a subset of 566 participants, was negatively related to semester GPA (r ¼ .23)
(McCloskey, 2011).

Procedure
The questionnaire was administered online to students enrolled in three different
psychology courses: a lower division introductory statistics course, an upper
division intermediate statistics course, and an upper-division capstone psych-
ology course. The introductory statistics class serves students from a variety of
different majors in both the social and natural sciences, while the other two
classes are taken predominantly by psychology students. All students received
extra credit for participating in the study. After providing informed consent,
participants completed the questionnaire online. Of the 284 participants, one
person who did not answer all of the questions on the APS-S and another who
completed the survey twice (with slightly different answers) were excluded from
the analyses, resulting in a final sample of 282 participants. Along with complet-
ing demographic questions and the APS-S, one subset (n ¼ 98) of the partici-
pants completed the PASS, while another subset (n ¼ 71) completed the
Tuckman Scale.

Results
The mean items on the APS-S ranged from 2.34 (“I know I should work on
schoolwork, but I just don’t do it”) to 3.15 (“I get distracted by other, more fun,
things when I am supposed to work on schoolwork”), with standard deviations
ranging from 1.14 to 1.24 (Table 1). The mean of the five-item total scale was
13.52 (SD ¼ 4.81), with skew ¼ .113 (SE ¼ 0.15), and kurtosis ¼ .887
(SE ¼ 0.29). Inter-item and corrected item-total correlations ranged from .49
to .74 and .60 to .75, respectively.
Principal components analysis (PCA) of the APS-S was conducted, as
Bartlett’s test of sphericity indicated that the correlation matrix was

significantly
different from an identity matrix x2 ¼ 664:01, p 5 :001 . With 282
Yockey 175

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and component loadings of the items on the APS-S
(N ¼ 282).

Component
Item M SD Loading

1. I put off projects until the last minute. 3.10 1.15 .82
2. I know I should work on schoolwork, 2.34 1.20 .78
but I just don’t do it.
3. I get distracted by other, more fun, things when 3.15 1.14 .73
I am supposed to work on schoolwork.
4. When given an assignment, I usually put it away 2.57 1.23 .85
and forget about it until it is almost due.
5. I frequently find myself putting important deadlines off. 2.36 1.24 .86
Total score 13.52 4.81 –
Note. These items correspond to items 2, 4, 7, 17, and 23 as selected by McCloskey (2011) from his full-
length scale. As reported in the appendix in the original study (p. 57; McCloskey, 2011), each item uses a
5-point Likert scale, where 1 ¼ Disagree and 5 ¼ Agree.

participants, the PCA on the five-item scale was conducted with a subject to
variable ratio above 56 to 1, far exceeding the recommended minimum subject to
variable ratio of 10 (Nunnally, 1978, p. 421). Both eigenvalue > 1 (Kaiser, 1960)
and scree plot (Cattell, 1966) criteria indicated a one-component solution (eigen-
values: 3.26, 0.65, 0.45, 0.39, and 0.25), which accounted for 65% of the vari-
ance. A parallel analysis (Horn, 1965; O’Connor, 2000) was also conducted and
indicated a one-component solution as well, as only the first eigenvalue from the
PCA (3.26) exceeded its respective cutoff value obtained from the parallel ana-
lysis (parallel analysis cut-off values: 1.17, 1.07, 1.00, 0.93, 0.84), with all other
eigenvalues falling short of their respective parallel analysis-derived cutoff
values. Component loadings on the APS-S were high, ranging from .73 to .86
(Table 1).
The internal consistency reliability estimate was .87 (Cronbach’s a). The
APS-S also showed good estimates of convergent validity, with significant
correlations with both the PASS (r(96) ¼ .54, p < .001) and Tuckman Scale
(r(69) ¼ .79, p < .001). Finally, a 2 (gender) x 4 (ethnicity, ‘other’ category
excluded due to small N) ANOVA on APS-S total scores indicated a signifi-
cant main effect for gender (F(1, 246) ¼ 6.05, p ¼ .02, partial 2 ¼ 0.02,
Cohen’s d ¼ 0.32), with males (M ¼ 14.74, SD ¼ 4.83) reporting significantly
higher scores than females (M ¼ 13.02, SD ¼ 4.72). However, there was no
significant main effect of ethnicity (F(3, 246) ¼ 0.42, p > .05, partial 2 ¼ 0.01),
nor was there a significant interaction (F(3, 246) ¼ 0.37, p > .05, partial
2 ¼ 0.004).
176 Psychological Reports 118(1)

Discussion
The results indicated that the APS-S is a unidimensional measure of academic
procrastination, with good estimates of internal consistency reliability and con-
vergent validity. The high correlation of the more parsimonious five-item APS-S
with the 16-item Tuckman Scale was particularly impressive, considering that
the longer Tuckman Procrastination Scale is a commonly used measure of pro-
crastination. That the APS-S shared more variance with the Tuckman scale
(62%) than with the PASS (29%) is understandable, as the Tuckman scale
and APS-S tend to measure procrastination in a general sense, while the
PASS focuses exclusively on specific academic tasks, such as term papers and
reading assignments.
While the current study assessed the reliability and validity of the APS-S on
an ethnically diverse sample of undergraduate students, further investigation of
the scale is warranted. Assessing the reliability and validity of the APS-S with
students of other age groups (e.g., graduate students, high school students) and
academic disciplines is recommended. Additionally, while an ethnically diverse
sample from the United States was used in this study, assessing the psychometric
properties of the APS-S on samples from other countries would also be benefi-
cial. Furthermore, assessing the predictive validity of the APS-S on outcome
measures such as academic performance, in comparison to other measures of
procrastination, such as the Tuckman and PASS scales, is also recommended.
Finally, employing the scale using the more traditional endpoints of strongly
agree and strongly disagree (as opposed to “agree” and “disagree,” as originally
proposed) is also recommended. In fact, it would be interesting to see if any
differences exist in the statistical properties of the scale (e.g., M, SD, reliability,
validity, factor structure) when using these two types of descriptors as scale
endpoints (e.g., strongly agree vs agree).
In terms of study limitations, while an ethnically diverse sample was used, it
was one of convenience, which consisted of intact, self-selected participants from
three different psychology courses at a single university in the Western United
States. While one of the courses (introductory statistics) is a service course taken
by students from various majors on campus, including, for example, psychology,
biology, chemistry, and criminology (approximately 73% of students in this
class were not psychology majors), the other two courses were predominantly
taken by psychology students. While post hoc analyses comparing the introduc-
tory statistics class with the other two classes indicated highly similar estimates
in the reliability and structural validity of the scale, nevertheless, because intact
groups were used in the current study, with the sample consisting of a majority
of psychology students, examining the validity of the APS-S using more hetero-
geneous samples is recommended.
Regarding the distributional characteristics of the APS-S, while the results
indicated that the estimate of the skew was fairly low for the APS-S total score,
Yockey 177

the estimate of kurtosis was somewhat elevated in the current sample (z ¼ 3.07,
.887/.289). Generally speaking, regarding these two moments of the distribu-
tion, research tends to indicate that skew typically has the greatest overall effect
on the accuracy of some of the more commonly used statistical procedures, such
as tests on means (DeCarlo, 1997). Nevertheless, as kurtosis was somewhat
elevated, researchers should exercise vigilance in continuing to observe the dis-
tributional characteristics of the scale in future work.
Finally, the current study found a significant difference between men and
women on APS-S total scores, with men reporting significantly higher procras-
tination than women. Although they used a different measure of procrastination,
this is consistent with the results of Brownlow and Reasinger (2000) and Steel
and Ferrari (2013), who also found that males tended to report engaging in more
procrastination than females.
While further investigation of the APS-S is warranted, the results of the cur-
rent study indicated that the short form of the Academic Procrastination Scale
possessed good estimates of reliability and validity on a sample of 282 students.
Based on the results of the current work, the short form of the Academic
Procrastination Scale may be a good option for researchers who are looking
for a parsimonious measure of academic procrastination to include in their
studies.

Acknowledgment
The author would like to express his appreciation to Justin McCloskey, who granted
permission to reprint the scale items of the short form of the Academic Procrastination
Scale in the current work.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported in part by a research
grant received from the College of Science and Mathematics at California State
University, Fresno.

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Author Biography
Ronald D. Yockey is an associate professor of quantitative methods at California
State University, Fresno, where he teaches introductory, intermediate, and
advanced statistics courses. His research interests include quantitative methods
(simulation studies of all kinds) and academic procrastination. He is author of
the popular text, SPSS Demystified (Pearson), currently in its second edition.