Impact of Mindfulness on Equity Gaps in Procrastination

Procrastination behavior, very prevalent among college students in higher education, is inversely related to academic achievement, and is more likely among male, first generation, and underrepresented minority students. We test whether a semester-long intervention, consisting of three mindfulness pedagogical strategies designed to address varying aspects of procrastination, helps to reduce academic procrastination, generally, and for first-generation men, in particular. Self-reported procrastination levels were captured in pre- and post-tests using the 5-item Academic Procrastination Scale and compared using a difference in means t-tests across demographic characteristics. In t-tests of the pretests, we found that first-generation men reported significantly higher levels of procrastination than all other students, a difference which dropped away over the course of the semester. Further t-tests demonstrated that first generation men reported the strategy which asked them to become more mindful of their emotions to be significantly impactful compared to the rest of the sample. Drawing on these findings, we explore the implications of mindfulness for supporting first generation men in college, who enroll and graduate at lower rates, specifically exploring how mindfulness can mitigate the effects of masculine identities which can undermine academic achievement and encumber young men with restrictive emotionality (Liang et al. Citation2019).