Objectives. To determine how different types of prior knowledge (declarative and procedural) impact student achievement and how prior-knowledge assessment can be used as an instructional design too...

Procrastination is consistently viewed as problematic to academic success and students’ general well-being. There are prevailing questions regarding the underlying and maintaining mechanisms of procrastination which are yet to be learnt. The aim of the present study was to combine different ways to explain procrastination and explore how students’ time and effort management skills, psychological flexibility and academic self-efficacy are connected to procrastination as they have been commonly addressed separately in previous studies. The data were collected from 135 students who participated in a voluntary time management and well-being course in autumn 2019. The results showed that students’ ability to organize their time and effort has the strongest association with procrastination out of the variables included in the study. Psychological flexibility also has a strong individual role in explaining procrastination along with time and effort management skills. Surprisingly, academic self-efficacy did not have a direct association with procrastination. Interestingly, our findings further suggest that time and effort management and psychological flexibility are closely related and appear to go hand in hand and, thus, both need to be considered when the aim is to reduce procrastination. The implications of the findings are further discussed.

Studies on teachers' approaches to teaching have identified two qualitatively different categories of approaches. The learning-focused approach is about teaching as facilitating students' learning and learning as knowledge construction, while the content-focused approach concerns teaching as transmission of knowledge and learning as absorbing the transmitted information. The aim of the present study is to explore consonance and dissonance in the kinds of combinations of approaches to teaching that university teachers adopt. Ninety-seven academics from a wide variety of disciplines were interviewed. The themes of the interviews dealt broadly with issues related to teaching in higher education. The results showed that some teachers were clearly and systematically either learning or content focused. On the other hand, profiles of some teachers consisted of combinations of learning and content focused approaches or conceptions, making their profiles dissonant. Three types of dissonance were identified. Explanations for the dissonance and implications of dissonant and consonant teaching profiles are discussed.