How Study Environments Foster Academic Procrastination: Overview and Recommendations.

Procrastination is common among students, with prevalence estimates double or even triple those of the working population. This inflated prevalence indicates that the academic environment may appear as "procrastination friendly" to students. In the present paper, we identify social, cultural, organizational, and contextual factors that may foster or facilitate procrastination (such as large degree of freedom in the study situation, long deadlines, and temptations and distractions), document their research basis, and provide recommendations for changes in these factors to reduce and prevent procrastination. We argue that increased attention to such procrastination-friendly factors in academic environments is important and that relatively minor measures to reduce their detrimental effects may have substantial benefits for students, institutions, and society.

Skiing and Thinking About It: Moment-to-Moment and Retrospective Analysis of Emotions in an Extreme Sport.

Happiness is typically reported as an important reason for participating in challenging activities like extreme sport. While in the middle of the activity, however, participants do not seem particularly happy. So where does the happiness come from? The article proposes some answers from a study of facially expressed emotions measured moment-by-moment during a backcountry skiing event. Self-reported emotions were also assessed immediately after the skiing. Participants expressed lower levels of happiness while skiing, compared to when stopping for a break. Moment-to-moment and self-reported measures of emotions were largely unrelated. These findings are explained with reference to the Functional Wellbeing Approach (Vittersø, 2013), which argues that some moment-to-moment feelings are non-evaluative in the sense of being generated directly by the difficulty of an activity. By contrast, retrospective emotional feelings are more complex as they include an evaluation of the overall goals and values associated with the activity as a whole.

Quality assessment of the registration of vulvar and vaginal premalignant lesions at the Cancer Registry of Norway.

BACKGROUND: A crucial factor concerning the utility of Cancer Registries is the data quality with respect to comparability, completeness, validity and timeliness. However, the data quality of the registration of premalignant lesions has rarely been addressed. High grade vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia (VIN) and vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia (VaIN) are premalignant lesions which may develop into cancer, and are often associated with infection with the human papillomarvirus (HPV). The aim was to evaluate the quality of registration of VIN and VaIN at the Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN). MATERIAL AND METHODS: We re-collected all notifications with high grade VIN and VaIN diagnoses during 2002 to 2007 from pathology laboratories, and compared these to the data in the CRN database so as to quantitatively measure the completeness, validity and timeliness of the data. RESULTS: Over the period 2002 to 2007 we estimated the completeness of the 1556 VIN and 297 VaIN notifications to be 95.0% and 92.9%, respectively. The original and reabstracted topography codes showed major discrepancies for 12 of 642 (1.9%) VIN and 7 of 128 (5.5%) VaIN notifications. The original and reabstracted morphology codes for VIN and VaIN were identical for 724 out of 814 notifications. Sixteen notifications had a major discrepancy. For the period 2002 to 2007 the median time elapsed between date of diagnosis and date of registration were 436 and 441 days for VIN and VaIN cases, respectively. DISCUSSION: Based on the present analysis of the comparability, completeness, validity and timeliness of premalignant lesions of vulva and vagina, we conclude that the Cancer Registry of Norway is able to monitor such premalignant lesions satisfactorily.

Time trends in pharyngeal cancer incidence in Norway 1981-2005: a subsite analysis based on a reabstraction and recoding of registered cases.

OBJECTIVE: Incidence rates of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) have been reported to be increasing in several countries in recent decades, contrasting with trends of SCCs diagnosed in neighboring anatomical sites. We investigated whether changes in classification systems and/or coding/registration practices might explain the trends in Norway, focusing on changes in oropharyngeal cancer. METHODS: Trends in cancers of the oropharynx, base of tongue, nasopharynx, hypopharynx were graphically presented for the period 1981-2005, before and after recoding. Age-period-cohort and future prediction models were fitted to oropharyngeal SCC incidence. RESULTS: A total of 85 (3.7%) of the 2315 pharyngeal cancers required recoding. Rates of oropharyngeal cancer in Norway were consistently two to three times higher in men, with rapid increases in both men (5% per annum) and women (4.2% per annum). Assuming generational effects, male cohorts born 1915-1950 were at increasingly higher risk of the disease. The number of oropharyngeal cancer cases is expected to double in Norway by 2020. CONCLUSIONS: The trends were not considered materially biased by potential artefacts. The increasingly higher proportion of oropharyngeal SCC cancers is more likely explained by other factors, including an increasing high-risk HPV prevalence among recent cohorts. These results will likely have consequences on treatment and health care provision in the near future.

Are students' beliefs about knowledge and learning associated with their reported use of learning strategies?

BACKGROUND: Although considerable research has examined beliefs and learning outcomes (e.g. Schommer, 1990, 1993a, 1993b; Schommer & Dunnell, 1997), little has looked at the relationship between beliefs and the actual learning process. AIMS: This research examines the relationship between beliefs about learning and knowledge, and reports of learning strategy-use relevant for successful text comprehension. SAMPLE: Participants were 81 Norwegian university students who had studied from 1 to 4 years in a range of disciplines. METHOD: Students' beliefs about knowledge and learning were measured with the Schommer Epistemological Questionnaire (SEQ; Schommer, 1998b). Learning strategies particularly useful for text-based learning were measured with the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991). A correlational analysis between measures and full regression analyses of how beliefs influence strategy selection were performed. RESULTS: Beliefs about how thoroughly knowledge is integrated in networks (simple) and how fixed the ability to learn is from birth (fixed) contributed significantly to reported strategy use: Simple to rehearsal and organizational strategies, fixed to elaboration and critical thinking strategies, and a combination of simple and fixed to strategies relevant to the thoughtful monitoring of learning tasks. Beliefs about how certain knowledge is (certain) and how quickly learning can be expected to occur (quick) were not found to contribute to reported learning- strategy use in any significant way. CONCLUSION: Some, but not all, beliefs about knowledge and learning offer insight into students' reported use of learning strategies relevant for reading course literature.