Student, Course Design, or Context? Studying the Determinants of Academic Procrastination at Scale

Academic procrastination is a prevalent barrier to student success in higher education. While prior research has examined either individual differences or contextual factors that predict procrastination, far less is known about how these individual-level and course-level factors jointly shape these behaviors. Using three years of learning management system (LMS) and administrative data from nearly 11,000 undergraduate students across more than 5,000 courses at a large U.S. university, this study employs hierarchical linear models to decompose variance in procrastination and examine both student-level and course-level predictors. We find that course-level factors account for 44% of total variance in procrastination, substantially exceeding the variance attributable to student-level differences (14%). Consistent with existing literature, students' prior procrastination tendency strongly predicts later patterns, indicating persistent within-student tendencies. Importantly, the association between prior procrastination tendency and observed delay varies systematically across course contexts. Students with stronger prior procrastination histories exhibit especially large delay in courses with more assignments, longer assignment windows, larger class sizes, higher average grades, and higher proportions of quizzes and discussion-based assignments. These findings suggest that while individual behavioral tendencies provide valuable early signals of procrastination risk, course characteristics play an important role in shaping how this risk manifests. By integrating behavioral history with course-level features at scale, this study demonstrates that learning environments meaningfully moderate procrastination risk and highlights course design and data-assisted academic advising as scalable levers for mitigating delay behaviors.