I just have to color-code my books first...

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I have written about the work I and Björn Hedin do on procrastination and students' studying habits before. I wrote a blog post back in April about our project and about the upcoming 4th developmental conference for Swedish engineering educations. We submitted a contribution to that conference and it did indeed get accepted.

This is a national 2nd tier conference, and while there are proceedings, the purpose of the conference is more practical; people who are interested in pedagogical research and engineering educations can meet and inspire/be inspired by each other's examples.

Good enough, and, we did manage to whip a short (2000 words) paper together for the conference. Truth be told, while we planned the paper together, my colleague Björn did the absolute majority of the work involved in writing the paper, because the timing (deadline earlier this week) was totally wrong for me. This is the last week this autumn with a heavy teaching load (17 hours of face to face time with the students in my two courses), and, I also went to a retreat ("internat") for two days this week.

While I did publish the submitted abstract in my April blog post, the paper and the abstract has changed enough for me to publish the new abstract here. The title of the paper is "I'm gonna study now! I just have to color-code my books first". It is written in Swedish and here is a translation of the new abstract:

Procrastination, or, to postpone something against your own better judgement, is a large problem in society in general and for students in particular. In this article, we describe a training module on procrastination which we have introduced in two engineering programs at KTH, of which this article addresses the computer science and engineering program in which 466 students participated. The evaluation had a 100% response rate, and it shows that 95% of students had problems with procrastination and 43% had large or very large problems. 88% felt that procrastination was a good theme to discuss in their education, and 57% felt that the module had positive effects on their study habits. Only 7% felt that the module had not had any noticeable effects on their studies. As the module only requires 8 hours of work from students, we believe that the advantages imply that this, or a similar module, should be included in all engineering programs.

The conference will be held in northern Sweden next month. Björn will go there and present the paper. I haven't decided yet but I believe I just might skip this conference as I will do a lot of traveling in the end of this year.
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