Irrational Thoughts and Their Relation to Academic Procrastination in a Sample of Secondary Stage Students in the Schools of Ramallah and AlBireh Governorate – Palestine

Abstract

This study aims to identify irrational thought and its relationship to academic procrastination among secondary stage students in Ramallah and AlBireh Governorate’s schools, and the effect some variables (gender, field of specialization, grade, place of residence, and average) have on irrational ideas and academic procrastination. The researcher uses the relational descriptive approach. The sample consists of (369) male and female students selected using the stratified random sampling method. Two research tools are developed: (measuring irrational thoughts and academic procrastination), after the psychometrics characteristics of the tools are confirmed, they are applied to the research sample. The results indicate a positive direct relationship between irrational thought and academic procrastination, with a value of (584); whenever the level of irrational thought increases, the level of academic procrastination increases. Moreover, the degree of irrational thought and academic procrastination among the sample is medium. Furthermore, there is a predictive ability for the dimensions of irrational thoughts in academic procrastination, with no significant differences related to the variable of gender in general, with variation in the intervals of irritability in favor of females, and dependency in favor of males, and that there are no significant differences related to the variables of filed and place of residence in the irrational thoughts tools, while there are general differences on the levels of irritability and internal attribution of failure that were 69.99 to 70.99. Regarding academic procrastination tools, result reveal no significant differences for the variables grade and place of residence, with differences for males in the variable gender. Regarding “field of specialization”, some differences on the general and behavioral levels in favor of the Literary Stream students appear, in addition to differences related to the variable “average” in favor of 69.99 to 70.99. The research recommends more in-depth studies and research are conducted in this field due to its importance in investigating reasons behind thoughts of high school students leading to academic procrastination, and their role in developing preventive and guidance programs that limit irrational thinking, thus reducing academic procrastination.