A brief measure of academic procrastination in university students: development and validation of the Aitken Procrastination Inventory—Short Form
Lingxi Zeng, Yinlin Li, Tingting Wang, Yihan Wang, Qi Lu Huang, Xinying Weng, Jie Su, Ruizhe Wang, Tianshu Zhou, Zheng Li · 2026
Read A brief measure of academic procrastination in university students: development and validation of the Aitken Procrastination Inventory—Short Form by Lingxi Zeng, Yinlin Li, Tingting Wang, Yihan Wang, Qi Lu Huang, Xinying Weng, Jie Su, Ruizhe Wang, Tianshu Zhou, Zheng Li (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13234854.txt.
Description
Lingxi Zeng and co-authors shrink a standard questionnaire on student procrastination down to four questions. Long surveys crowd out other measures in education research, so brief tools matter. Starting from the established Aitken inventory, the team had over twelve hundred Chinese undergraduates answer the full set, then searched for the best tiny subset.
An ant-colony search method picked candidate short forms in half the sample; checks in the other half confirmed the winner. The four-item form held together as one clean scale with good consistency. Its scores rose alongside fear of failure, stress, anxiety, and depression, matching the view of procrastination as avoidance. The authors offer the short form as a sound, space-saving measure for campus studies.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lingxi Zeng, Yinlin Li, Tingting Wang, Yihan Wang, Qi Lu Huang, Xinying Weng, Jie Su, Ruizhe Wang, Tianshu Zhou, Zheng Li |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 30 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |