Julia is in her final year as a psychology student at the University of Mannheim in Germany. She is about to embark on her Bachelor’s Thesis. Here, she describes the start of this journey.
Frank: So, we are live, and it is, help me, Julia, what’s today’s date? The 11th of March?
Julia: Yes, that’s right.
Frank: 10:30 in the morning or thereabouts, and I am with Julia, who is a psychology student in Mannheim. And in your final year, is that correct?
Julia: Yes, that’s right. It’s my last semester.
Frank: Big changes on the horizon. And before they let you, or release you into the grips of humanity, you have to do one big thing.
Julia: Yes, that’s my bachelor thesis.
Frank: Your bachelor’s thesis. Okay, so can you tell us about this and what it is you are going to do in your bachelor thesis?
Julia: It’s a kind of field experiment and I will do it at the Faculty of Educational Psychology.
Frank So, what topic are you going to discuss or write your thesis about?
Julia: The topic is procrastination, which means that you intend to do something, but then you don’t do it. And I want to explain if self-efficacy plays a role in procrastination or if it affects procrastination.
Frank: Okay, so before we dive into this a little deeper, hand on your heart, Julia, do you procrastinate, yourself?
Julia: Of course. I think almost everyone does. There are many tasks I don’t like to do. So, I do something else instead. And for a short time, it makes you feel better because you’ve done something else, but the other tasks won’t go away.
Frank: So, there’s the built-in hope that if you are distracted, the task will feel ignored and run away because you are not looking after it. It’s not getting any attention. Okay. So, you are a procrastinator. Would you consider yourself an expert in doing a bachelor thesis on procrastination because you have a lot of experience in this field already?
Julia: Yes, maybe. I’ve never seen it this way before, but yes, I think it helps if you know the problem you try to…..
Frank: To solve it. Okay. All right. So, you are an expert. So, the people who will read this thesis will understand that they are dealing with an expert. So, this is a field study that you’re going to do. So, can you describe this field study to me? So, who is the target group? How are you going to conduct this field study? What is the goal of the field study? I vaguely remember the last time we talked about this, the professor who gave you this thesis has some sort of a computer program that you and another person are going to test. So, can you paint the picture about all of this?
Julia: Yes. My supervisor has developed learning software for students, especially for the psychology students at the University of Mannheim. And this software is aimed to help learning or assist learning for lectures of our study. So, what I’m going to do, I will use this software to get my data. So, every time a student logs on to the software, he or she will have to answer certain questions. And then we will measure some more data. For example, how long he or she uses the software and how many questions he or she answers, and so on. And from this data, I will then calculate my results.
Frank And you will come to a conclusion. Can you describe this software to us? If I log into this software, what is it supposed to do? If I’m a student, how does it help me? And what can I do with it?
Julia We have some complicated lectures at the beginning of the study. Statistics, which is very important for psychology students and especially at the University of Mannheim. They really focus on methods and statistics and quantitative analysis. So, it’s a very difficult subject and the software is based on the lecture, and you can practice everything you learn in the lecture because the lectures are not really practical or hands-on.
Frank It’s a lot of theory.
Julia Yes. And with the help of the software, you can practice, you can really do the calculations and learn how it works.
Frank So, it’s like exercises that are related to the content of the lecture. So, you would have the theory as delivered by the person giving the lecture. And then the software consists of practical learning exercises to deepen and help understand what the lecturer is talking about.
Julia Yes, exactly.
Frank OK, so how does this tie into procrastination?
Julia: For example, you could formulate the theory that when you study for an exam and the exam is far, far away, you won’t put as much effort into your study as when it’s maybe next week. So, you can see that the students log in more often at the end of the semester when the exam is close. And they spend a lot more time with the software when the exam is close than before. So, you could come to the conclusion that they procrastinate because they keep waiting until the end of the semester to start learning.
Frank So, is one of the goals of this software that you people have created, is it to try and show that learning is a continuous process and not to be done at the last minute, exam or no exam? That if you just spend five minutes a day looking at some statistic exercises, you take the pressure of last-minute cramming out of the system. Is that what the goal is?
Julia: No. For that goal, I think we would have to compare the different types of students and their learning results, so the grade of the exam. But that is not what we are doing in the bachelor’s theatres. We just want to see if self-efficacy helps you procrastinate less.
Frank: Okay. So, how, at this point, you haven’t started yet, have you, with this analysis? Have you?
Julia: No, I have met my supervisor several times and we’re talking about the underlying theory and the topic itself, but I’ve not started yet.
Frank: Okay. A couple of questions. Why did you choose this particular subject?
Julia: To be honest, I had a lot of subjects I could choose to choose from. I knew that I wanted to do my bachelor thesis with this one supervisor, and he has a lot of different topics he researches. And it just developed. We talked about different topics, and he told me what he was interested in. I told him what I was interested in, and it just developed in some direction, and then we came up with this topic.
Frank: Okay. So how do you prepare yourself for such a project, and how are you going to implement it? So let’s start with the preparation. How do you actually prepare yourself for this kind of study?
Julia: What do you mean by preparing yourself?
Frank: Well, you’ve got to somehow, you’ve got a blank piece of paper. You and your supervisor discussed this. You developed the idea, and then at some point, you have to start doing something before you actually go out and start researching what students do or do not do. So what thinking and what planning did you have to do before you can actually start?
Julia: Yes. We decided to do the thesis on the topic of procrastination. So, the first step was to read about procrastination. What are the effects of procrastination? What influences procrastination? Which forms of procrastination are there? So, you just try to get as much information as possible about the topic, and then by talking about it, you develop some kind of theory what you could research. And then you need to find a foundation in the existing literature. So you can’t suggest anything. You can’t say, “I believe, I don’t know.” You have to find theories that are already established, which help you formulate your question and your topic.
Frank: So, procrastination, in actual fact, is quite a complex thing. I thought procrastination was simply, “I’m not in the mood to do something, so I’m going to push it down the road until I have to do it, because if I don’t do it, the consequences will be horrible.” That procrastination is actually a little bit more complex. That’s new. So, for us who procrastinate but don’t understand what it is, can you give us a brief summary about procrastination?
Julia: As I said, procrastination is not doing something you’re supposed to do, even though you know it will have bad consequences if you don’t do it. Of course, it can influence your mood. It can influence your performance. It can influence motivational aspects. So that’s what procrastination can do. But there are also several moderators to it. For example, as I said, if the deadline comes closer, you procrastinate less. Or if the task you’re supposed to do is something you really don’t like, you procrastinate more.
Frank Given that this field study that you are doing has to also have a foundation of the preparation phase, what do you do in order to record what you have done to prepare everything so that the field study has some concrete value at the end?
Julia: We have to plan it. Exactly. We have to write what we are planning to do and how we are planning to do it. And my supervisor even wants to, you call it, pre-register our study. That means that you use an online tool to write down what you want to do.
It’s something you do, which has established the last few years because there was a crisis in the psychology field because studies couldn’t be replicated and there was a lot of faking. So nowadays, if you want to be a good researcher, you have your studies pre-registered and you tell them, I’m going to do this. I have the theory that this will happen, and the measures I’m taking are the following. And you have to explain everything really in detail.
And so we are doing a pre-registration, and I have to write an exposé for my supervisor and professor of the faculty. And they have to give their opinion and say that what I’m planning to do is okay.
Frank And so writing the exposé also means you have to stick to certain rules in how to write it and the structure and the content, etc. You just can’t write, well, one day I had coffee with my supervisor? and we had a lovely chat and we decided to do this, that and the other. And this is what I did and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Julia. That’s not the way to do it, no?
Julia No, it has to have a certain structure. And so what I’m doing now is really the important part for the thesis because you have to decide which route you want to go and what measures you want to take. And after I’ve written the exposé, it’s only doing. There’s no more thinking about it.
Frank: It’s only the executing of it all, the executing. Okay. So, looking at timelines, so you’re in the planning phase. When did you start? How long do you have to do this? And then if I understand this correctly, at some point you will then do the study itself. You will then get people to use the software, do something and answer questions, etc. And then at the end you will have an evaluation phase and then you will have probably another phase. So, what’s the timeline that we are looking at here?
Julia: At the moment, as I told you, we are talking about the topic and what I’m going to do. And we have to decide before Easter. So, the end of March, yeah. Yes, because then my supervisor will start to sell his learning software to the students. And at that point, they have to implement all the questions. So, I have to know which question I want to ask in the software and my supervisor will have to implement it. So, this I need to do before the end of March and then the field study starts.
So, we are collecting all the data until the 15th of June, because then there’s the exam for which the students prepare with the software. And my exposé, I will have to write it until the end of April. And with the exposé starts a time of 12 weeks, which I have to write the thesis itself. So, when I have written the exposé, I will have 12 weeks. So, end of April, May, June, July, end of July, I will then be finished.
Frank Okay, I mean, it’s August and it’s holidays. So just to wrap this one up for today. So your supervisor created some software designed to help students who study psychology at the University of Mannheim, to help them understand statistics and the mathematical side of this subject. And then they are given exercises to prepare for an exam. And your role is to evaluate what they do, when and how they do it as best as possible using this software.
Julia Yes and no. Everything you said is correct. But I just look at a really, really specific little part of what they are doing. I just want to see if the students who report a higher self-efficacy procrastinate less. It’s a really small detail.
Frank What happens if they don’t buy the software?
Julia Then we have less participants. If nobody buys the software, I would have a big problem. But I think 80 or 90% of the students of one semester buy it, because it’s really helpful.
Frank And it’s competitively priced. So it’s not that expensive to purchase.
Julia No, it’s not that expensive. I don’t know what it costs, to be honest. But you can buy packages with other students and it gets cheaper.
Frank Okay, so you are then going to give your supervisor by the end of July, you are going to give him the results of your findings of your study. What can he do with it and what might he do with it and what is he going to do with it?
Julia We pre-register the study, or we will pre-register the study. So if there’s something interesting that I find, it is possible that he will publish it in some kind of journal. But that’s the best thing that could happen if he finds some interesting effect. Then he could publish it.
What he can do is also, I didn’t tell you yet, but I’m doing the thesis with another student. And she does a slightly different topic and she, that’s hard to explain.
She wants to evaluate more generally how students use his software. And for him, it’s really interesting to know if they only use it to check if they understood everything, if they maybe learn with their books and the lecture and just use the software to check if they understood everything correctly, or if they use the software really to learn, so they don’t use their books and just use the software to repeat and repeat and repeat to learn the topic. So that’s something we will find out with our thesis. And for example, this is a very interesting point for him to know. What’s the normal usage of the software he developed?
Frank So it is for him also a little bit of market research and product development so that maybe not so much from your angle, but from your co-study person’s angle, that he can then improve the product to make it more accessible and better for the students.
Julia Yes.
Frank All right. Well, I think we have a basic understanding of where we are going in this. So, Julia, thank you for your initial explanation in what I think is a very complicated subject. And I look forward to asking more questions and discussing this with you over the next few months to see where this journey will take you and what is interesting and what you have learned out of this process. So thank you for speaking to us about it today.
Julia Of course.