Predictors of academic procrastination and university life satisfaction among Turkish sport schools students

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of burnout, academic self-efficacy and academic success in predicting procrastination and university life satisfaction among sports schools students. The study sample comprised of 224 participants aged from 18 to 30 years with a mean age of 21.71 (SD=1.94) who were attending various departments of sport school in a public university. A quantitative research survey method was used in the study. Clustered sampling procedure was utilized in order to get a more representative sample. Pearson’s product moment’s correlation coefficient, hierarchical regression analysis, the independent ttest and one-way ANOVA were used for data analysis. Significance was set at a minimum of 0.05. Results indicate that academic burnout, academic selfefficacy and academic success are significant predictors of procrastination. According to these results, burnout seems to be the strongest predictor which explains 32.3% of the variance in procrastination. On the other hand, efficacy dimension of burnout was the only significant predictor of university life satisfaction among Turkish sports schools students.


INTRODUCTION
University education is known as a critical transitional period in the process of development for every adult.During this period, number of developmental challenges in fluctuant level and variety were experienced (Choate and Smith, 2003).These years are full of instability, exploration, and adjustment which in turn contribute to identity and self-concept (Arnett, 2004).Understanding how to balance academic and personal elements of life in university provide students not only new opportunities for growth but also various constraints in the way of success (Ottenwriter, 2004).For that reason, universities have hard but important responsibilities as well.
One of the main responsibilities of higher education is to coach qualified human resources to meet the needs of major organizations, business and companies (Besette and Burton, 2014).Thus, higher education institutions should regularly observe and define the needs of society, and satisfy these needs by generating high levels of knowledge with collaborative learning (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007).Additionally, higher education institutions must be aware of the resposibities in accelerating the readiness of professionals in all areas (for example, health, education, science etc.) of the society.That is why university life is a very important part of life journey and career development of students and sustainability of public benefits.
Transforming an adolescent into a professional is a highly critical matter which has numerous dimensions.According to Duru (2008) college life is not only the vital part of students" academic development, but also the important elements of their social integration to the society.During the period, students face various adverse experiences which may inhibit their academic and social development.The perceptions, responses, behaviors and strategies of students in this period have been the focus of a considerable amount of research studies in the related literature.
This study focuses on the experiences of sports schools students.Physical education teachers, sports managers, recreation leaders and coaches are among the most needed professionals in the Turkish society.When the study compare the statistic provided by Bottenburg (2011) and Turkish Ministy of Health (2013); participation of leisure time physical activity ratio in Turkey is only 3.5% which is 16 times lower than Holland (53%), 12 times lower than England (41%) and 10 times lower than Italy (35%) although there are 54 educational institutions in Turkey training sport related professionals (Yıldız, 2008).According to Yıldız et al. (2007) 5120 students were educated by 131 different departments of sport schools.Other statistics indicate that more than 40.000 university graduates were unemployed (Ziyagil, 2014).This contradiction constitutes a huge problem to be dealt with.
There might be three main dimensions of this problem.The first one is managerial level problems that universities fail to provide sufficient and contemporary education to the students.The second one is; individual level problems that students fail to utilize sufficiently the provided education and facilities at the universities.The third one is overall system level problems that cover students, society and educational institutions together.
This study considers the individual level dimensions of academic and social development of students (that is, academic success, academic self-efficacy burnout university life satisfaction and procrastination) at once.With the support of existing literature, procrastination and university life satisfaction are determined as outcome variables hypothised to be effected by academic success, academic self-efficacy and burnout.
Procrastination is defined as the voluntary yet irrational delay of an intended course of action (Steel, 2007).Academic procrastination has been a barrier that college students have to deal with as a main issue, and considerable attention has been given to procrastination in university settings (Ferrari et al., 2005;Haghbin et al., 2012;Howell et al., 2006;Klassen et al., 2008;Lee, 2005;Schraw et al., 2007;Schraw et al., 2007).Previous Ocal 483 research has focused mainly on the negative consequences of academic procrastination, on academic performance (Balkis andDuru, 2010, 2012;Fritzsche et al., 2003;Schouwenburg et al., 2004) and college students" psychological well being (Lee, 2005;Balkis, 2013;Dewitte and Schouwenburg, 2002;Ferrari and Scher, 2000;Fritzsche et al., 2003;Lee, 2005;Midgley and Urdan, 2001), with research into the factors affecting procrastination of university students very limited.Life satisfaction on the other hand is a level of plessure ones own life is condition to after a comparison predetermined criteria is defined by the individual (Akın and Yalnız, 2015;Ülker et al., 2013).Different from happiness which defines postive feelings about future and more notional (Keser, 2003), life satisfaction matters to current condition (Gülcan, 2014).Every individual tend to reach the highest level of life satisfaction, although it depends on personal criteria and perceptions.Academic satisfaction is the part of general life satisfaction which represents the unique positive estimation related to the university life and related outcomes (Oliver and DeSarbo, 1989).According to Karatekin (2013), there are many variables related to life satisfaction.Zhai (2012) put forth the same arguments for student satisfaction.The variables related to the student satisfaction can be listed as students" characteristics (Mooney, 2010), institutional characteristics (Mavondo et al., 2004), gender, academic performance, grade level, services and facilities, attendance, social relations, and academic programs (Burbach et al., 2010).
Increasing student populations and rising competitive environment in higher education require focusing on better management practices (Arslan and Akkas, 2014).Limited resources put pressure on universities to improve their performance and develop measurable outcomes (Decramer et al., 2013;Veld et al., 2010).It is clear that understanding factors related to procrastination and university life satisfaction provide important information for creating better educational environment for students and academic staff (Balkis, 2013).According to Pehlivan"s (2010) study; sport school students" positive attitutes toward their job decrease during their university years.This reduction is a barrier for them to contribute to Turkish sport settings and sport education effectively.Moreover, this reduction also results in negative image of sports schools which have important responsibilities and roles to increase exhilaration and mobility in campus settings.
According to the study of Uzun et al. ( 2010) little empirical research has been conducted to determine the levels of academic procrastination and the causal factors contributing to the procrastination experience among Turkish university students.For that reason, this study primarily aims to investigate the role of student burnout, academic self-efficacy and academic success in predicting procrastination and life satisfaction in university settings with the sample of physical education and sport school students.Additionally, differences in the level of student burnout, academic self-efficacy, academic success, procrastination and university life satisfaction according to the certain demographic characteristic (for example, age, gender, area, and grade) of participants were also researched.

Research model
In this quantitative research, a survey method was used.Through this way, more participants were reached in order to increase the possibility of generating results to the related population.Additionally, clustered sampling procedure, a commonly used method when groups rather than individuals are randomly selected and when it is difficult or impossible to select individuals randomly, (Fraenkel and Wallen, 2008) was used in order to get more representative sample.

Participants
Participants of this research were 224 university students selected from a Sports School in Turkey.In terms of gender, 80 (35.7%) of the participants were female and 144 (64.3%) of the participants were male.The ages of participants range from 18 to 30 with a mean of 21.71 (SD=1.94).Further information about participants is given in Table 1.

Measures
Four different types of measures were used in order to obtain data.Additionaly, various demographic questions were included in the questionnaire sheet.

Student burnout
The original form of Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) was developed by Schaufeli et al. (2002) to assess students' sense of perceived burnout in academic setting.A reliability and validity study of the Turkish version of the MBI-SS carried out by Capri et al. ( 2011) confirmed the 3-factor structure with 13 items of the original instrument, with 5 items for exhaustion, 4 items for cynicism, and 4 items for efficacy.Each item is rated using a 7-point rating scale from 1 ("Never") to 7 ("Always").The current study found Cronbach alpha coefficients for the dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism and efficacy to be 0.71, 0.85 and 0.65, respectively.

University life satisfaction
Life satisfaction was measured with the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), (Diener et al.,1985), consisting of 5 items designed to measure global cognitive judgments of satisfaction with one's life (for example, the conditions of my life are excellent).The reliability of the scale (Cronbach's α) was 0.81.For this study, "my life" was modified to "my university life" inorder to direct the student focus on university life.The alpha coefficient for the current sample was 0.82.

Procrastination
The Tuckman Procrastination Scale (TPS) was developed to assess college students' procrastination tendencies (Tuckman, 1991).The English version of the instrument included 16 items rated on a four point scale (1: Strongly disagree, 4: Strongly agree) and had a single factor structure with a loading of 0.40 or higher.In the original study, Cronbach's α was 0.86 (Tuckman, 1991), and in a more recent study, Tuckman (2007) reported Cronbach's α to be

Academic success
Grades and GPA are the most commonly used measure of academic success (York et al., 2015).Academic achievement of students was gathered on an open-ended question (for example, what is your GPA score?) in this study.

Demographic information sheet
Demographics information sheet, prepared for this study, includes personal information such as gender, age and academic achievement.Academic achievement was represented by students" report of their GPA in the semester just before the questionnaire was filled out.

Data collection procedures
A survey instruments were administered in the campus setting during fall semester.Participant was given information related to the study, and their written consent was obtained.No inducement or no reward was given for participation.Completing the scale took approximately 15 min and participants were aware of the possibility to quit participation in any time they want.

Data analysis
Data analysis was carried out by means of SPSS 22.0.First, descriptive statistics were used for scanning data and missing variables.Expectation of maximization was conducted in order to complete missing parts.Then Pearson"s product moment"s correlation coefficient was administered to find the level and the directions of associations between predictors and dependent variables.Besides, a hierarchical regression analysis was conducted in order to see how well procrastination and university life satisfaction are predicted by academic burnout, academic selfefficacy and academic success.Finaly, independent t-test and oneway ANOVA were used for determining the differences in the level of student burnout, academic self-efficacy, academic success, procrastination and university life satisfaction according to the demographic characteristic of participants.Significance was set at a minimum of 0.05, while other significance levels (0.01 and 0.001) were also shown.

RESULTS
Prior to the main analysis, data were examined in terms of the assumptions for hierarchical regression analysis, ttest, ANOVA and the main assumptions were evidenced.Table 2 gives the intercorrelations among predictors (that is, exhaustion, cynicism and efficacy, academic selfefficacy and academic success) and dependent variables (that is, procrastination and academic life satisfaction).
Results indicated that all correlations between predictors and procrastination were statistically significant, with correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.48.On the other hand, university life satisfaction is significantly correlated with only exhaustion, cynicism and efficacy which are the dimensions of burnout ranging from 0.23 to 0.40.
A hierarchical regression analysis was employed to determine the relative effect of the predictor variables on dependent variables ((a) Procrastination; (b) University Life Satisfaction).
The relationship between predictor variables and the scores of dependent variables was examined using a 3step hierarchical regression analysis conducted with 6 predictors (Table 3):  The specific order of variable entry was selected so that each predictor contributed to the explanatory variance of outcome variable scores after controlling for the variance explained by the previous variables and also in order of presumed causality.
Result Table 5 indicates that there are statically significant difference (p<0.05) in students" life satisfaction levels in terms of their grades (F (3, 220) = 3.55, p =0.015).
Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD, which is more appropriate test when the sample sizes are not equal and all pairwise comparisons are desired (Tabachnick and Fidell, 2013), indicated that the mean score for the life satisfaction levels of 1st grade students (M = 3.30, SD= 0.92) is significantly higher than the life satisfaction levels of 4th grades (M = 2.27, SD = .75)and life satisfaction levels of 3rd grades (M = 2.92, SD = 0.89).

DISCUSSION
The main aim of this study was to examine the role of student burnout, academic self-efficacy and academic success in predicting procrastination and life satisfaction of students of sport schools at higher education.Additionally, it was also aimed to investigate whether there were significant differences in study variables in terms of age, gender, grade, part time working, being a member of a team and having financial support.As a member of a sport school, my own experiences on students" absenteeism, failures, low GPAs, unfinished duties, unfair complains about time, contents, and works loads motivate the study to choose these variables with the help of previous studies in the literature.Beside these, choosing sports school students as a study group have additional important reasons.First of all, sports schools generally become ineffective to provide professionals to change sports habits of Turkish society.
The second one is that sport schools are generally considered as an easier way to be a university student (Ocal, 2016).As a result, higher rates of absenteeism, delays at delivering homeworks, and relatively lower performance at lessons are common characteristics of sports school students.All these reasons can be considered as evidence for a chaos in sports education.These chaotic conditions have economic, social and individual level effects.It has economic effects that the government devotes huge amounts of investments on sports facilities at universities (Erkan, 2014) but not effectively used.There is a social effect that graduates fail to increase physical activity levels of people in the society.There is an also individual level effect that most students can not find job after graduation.Therefore, result of this study intends to shed light on the individual factors that contribute to this problem.
The results from correlation analyses show that except from university life satisfaction, all other variables, academic self-efficacy, academic success, and all three dimension of burnout (Exhaustion, Cynicism and Efficacy) are related with procrastination.In addition, academic burnout academic self-efficacy and academic success are significant predictors of procrastination.According to these results, burnout seems to be the strongest predictor which explains 32.3% of the variance in procrastination.This suggests that as the burnout levels of student increase they tend to procrastinate more.
These findings provide further evidence for the findings on the relationships of student burnout with negative student behaviors and outcomes in university settings such as student resistance behaviors (Cakir, 2015), lower levels of academic performance (Schaufeli et al., 2002) and lower levels of academic achievement (Yang, 2004).There are several possible explanations for academic procrastination being positively related with burnout.Student burnout is reluctance to do study related activities and willing to escape school environment (Schaufeli et al., 2002).Therefore, procrastination is a consequent response that comes after burnout by avoiding participating school related work load.Similarly in a recent study conducted with university students, it is reported that cynicism had a positive correlation, and efficacy had a negative correlation with student resistance (Cakir, 2015).
Academic self-efficacy and academic success were other predictors of procrastination in the study.These finding suggest that as the actual academic success and academic self-efficacy increases, the procrastination levels of students tend to decreases.These findings are consistent with previous findings that high level of academic procrastination is associated with poor academic performance (Balkis and Duru, 2009;Balkis and Duru, 2010).This is a clockwise interaction.Students who were more organized and self-determined in their motivation were less likely to procrastinate (Burnam et al., 2014).According to Park and Kerr (1990) a student"s cumulative grade point average is a common indicator of academic success.Grade point average will be conceptualized as the determinant of ones" past performances.High grade point is a result of regular study, participation in class activities and self-leadership.
The concept behind the scene of these skills is moti-vation to success.Therefore, high GPA is not only performance evaluation in sport schools but also it sets a standard for students" perception of academic life.Additionally, high GPA results in self-confident students who are less likely to procrastinate (Katz et al., 2013).There are significant relationships between the college students" feeling of academic success and academic procrastination (Zhu, 2014).
Another outcome variable of this study is university life satisfaction.Student burnout, academic self-efficacy and academic success were hypothesized to predict university life satisfaction.It is found that efficacy dimension of student burnout was the only significant predictor of university life satisfaction.According to this result, the more students feel incompetent as a student, the less they are satisfied with their university life.A study on the relations among life satisfaction, burnout, engagement and hopelessness of high school students was conducted by Capri et al. ( 2013) and the authors found that high school students" life satisfaction scores have a negative relation with burnout.
According to Azizli et al. (2015), life satisfaction was most strongly correlated with general self-efficacy.Results from Luszczynska et al. (2005) cross-cultural study demonstrated a positive relationship between general self-efficacy and academic, vocational and social satisfaction.Studies have identified domain-specific selfefficacy as having a moderating effect on the types of planning and behavior (Luszczynska et al., 2011).Current finding of the study provides further evidence for the relationship between efficacy and life satisfaction by adding specific evidence on the relationship between efficacy and university life satisfaction.
Other findings of the study are the GPA scores and efficacy level of females higher than males.According to Thuneberg et al. (2015), girls in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries almost always have higher marks in GPA and PISA than boys.This conclusion is also supported by the study findings that the GPAs of females were significantly greater than that those of males.These findings confirm the findings of other studies regarding the advantages that females exhibit over males in terms of different college and university academic outcomes (Buchmann and DiPrete, 2006;Furnham et al., 2013;Sackett et al., 2009).According to Özkan and Gizir (2013), the main explanation behind this situation is the highest motivation of girls that lead to enter university than boys.Additionally, in their studies girls have higher motivations for having status, personality development levels and independence than boys at the university.
On the other hand, freshman"s have more university life satisfaction than seniors and juniors.Most student satisfaction scores improve as the number of quality interactions with peers and faculty members increase (Kuh et al., 2006).In the first years in sport schools, curriculums are generally designed for students"orientation to university environments.Thus, students have more leisure time, and they are highly motivated to making social links with others.Many students experience independence from their families for the first time in their life, which provide them more freedom.With the increase of grades, responsibilities of the students increase and they need to spend more time for school base works.They also realize the competitions exist between schoolmates, and difficulties to actualize career objectives.For that reason 3 and 4th grade students have lower scores in satisfaction level.The study of Yıldırım et al. (2015) provided consistent results.In their study, they suggested that fourth grade students tend to have less satisfaction than first grade students because of career anxiety and boredom in campus life.

Table 1 .
Demographic characteristics of the participants.

Table 2 .
Correlation matrix and descriptive statistics.
Jerusalem and Schwarzer (1981)originally developed byJerusalem and Schwarzer (1981)in German language was used in this study.They obtained a 0.87 reliability coefficient for 7 items measuring one factor.ASES are rated by each participant on a 4item Likert scale as: very appropriate, appropriate, and not appropriate and not appropriate at all.The scale has only one negative item (7).Turkish version of ASES was developed byYılmaz et al. (

Table 3 .
Summary of hierarchical regression analysis for procrastination and university life satisfaction.

Table 4 .
Result of the independent samples T-test.

Table 5 .
Result of the One-way ANOVA.