Si près du but : facteurs et processus liés au dépôt différé du mémoire de fin d'études

(eng) This thesis focuses on the factors that affect the postponement in the completion of the final dissertation. This research question has not been studied in the literature concerning academic achievement. Two research approaches were adopted. The first has been exploratory and has analyzed the influence of multiple factors, representing different aspects of student last year’s life (its social environment, motivation, engagement and individual characteristics), on the final dissertation’s postponement. Two integrative and quantitative studies have shown that students who postposed their final dissertation were those who were less engaged, had role conflicts between their the realization of final dissertation and their everyday life, do not have confidence in their ability to achieve this work and experienced mainly negative emotions while working on it. Our second approach has been theoretical and has consisted in testing existing theoretical models in the literature that focuses on student engagement. To test these models allows representing how the independent variables interact with each other to produce the final dissertation’s postponement. Two studies showed that the supervisor and the institution had an important role on students because they influenced their motivation which, in turn, is a predictor of their efforts and their success. Moreover, among the different behaviors that can adopt the supervisor, its support of the students’ autonomy has the greatest impact on the development of its critical thinking while working on the final dissertation.