A reciprocal perspective on the differential associations between personality traits and multiple indicators of academic achievement.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the reciprocal associations between personality traits (conscientiousness and openness to experience) and academic achievement in adolescents, using the Personality Achievement Saturation Hypothesis (PASH). BACKGROUND: Personality traits, especially conscientiousness, and openness, have been identified as strong predictors of academic achievement. The PASH provides a framework for understanding these relationships but has mainly been studied from a unidirectional perspective. This study extends the PASH to examine reciprocal associations and how they vary with different achievement indicators. METHODS: Using large-scale panel data (N = 6482) of secondary school students in Germany, we applied cross-lagged panel models and latent change score models to examine the differential reciprocal associations between personality traits (conscientiousness/openness) and academic achievement (school grades/achievement test scores) in language and math over two years from grades 7 to 9. RESULTS: In line with the PASH, initial levels of conscientiousness were more strongly associated with school grades than with achievement test scores over two years. Simultaneously, prior school grades were more strongly associated with conscientiousness over two years. However, initial levels of openness did not show differential associations with either school grades or achievement test scores over two years. Similarly, prior school grades and achievement test scores were also not differentially associated with openness over two years. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings introduce an innovative lens through which we observe how the PASH can be leveraged to explain the differential reciprocal associations between conscientiousness and academic achievement. Further research is needed to examine if PASH could be similarly extended to disentangle the associations between openness and academic achievement.

A closer look at the domain-specific associations of openness with language achievement: Evidence on the role of intrinsic value from two large-scale longitudinal studies.

BACKGROUND: Many empirical investigations focus on how personality traits and academic motivation are related to academic achievement. Regarding the personality traits described in the five-factor model, prior research has shown associations between openness to experience and language achievement in particular. Following the principle of trait activation, associations with intrinsic value can explain these domain-specific relationships of openness with achievement. AIMS: This study investigated whether intrinsic value mediates the associations of openness to experience with language achievement to understand these associations more closely. Based on the principle of trait activation, we combined openness to experience with intrinsic value as a motivational construct more proximal to behaviour. SAMPLES: We capitalized on two large-scale longitudinal data sets (N = 1994; M = 16.8 years; 51% female; and N = 2722; M = 17.34 years; 58% female) of German-speaking students in upper secondary education with two points of measurement, respectively. METHODS: We assessed achievement using report card grades and standardized test scores, capturing three language subskills: reading and listening, measured by standardized tests, and writing competencies, measured by essay assignments. We conducted mediation analysis using bootstrapped confidence intervals and robust standard errors to account for dependencies in the data due to students clustered within classrooms. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our results show that intrinsic value mediated the relationship between openness and achievement in English as a foreign language. The results remained stable when controlling for prior achievement, predicting achievement gains. Our investigation provides empirical insights into the manifestations of personality in academic contexts. We discuss the limitations of our approach, with a focus on the use of a mediation analysis in this research design.

Self-Control Outdoes Fluid Reasoning in Explaining Vocational and Academic Performance-But Does It?

Trait self-control, the ability to interrupt undesired behavioral tendencies and to refrain from acting on them, is one of the most important socio-emotional skills. There had been some evidence that it outperforms intelligence in predicting students' achievement measured as both school grades and standardized achievement tests. However, recent research has shown that the relationships between trait self-control and measures of achievement are more equivocal, emphasizing the importance of the respective outcome of the test to the individual. On the one hand, high-stakes school achievement measures such as GPA repeatedly showed strong relationships with trait self-control. On the other hand, findings on the relationships between trait self-control and performance in mostly low-stakes standardized achievement tests were more heterogeneous. The substantial positive relationship between intelligence and both achievement measures is uncontested. However, the incremental value of trait self-control beyond intelligence when investigating their relationships with achievement remains uncertain. To investigate the relationships of self-control with school achievement and two standardized achievement tests (school mathematics and physics) beyond fluid reasoning, we drew on a large heterogeneous sample of adults in vocational training (N = 3,146). Results show differential patterns of results for fluid reasoning and trait self-control and the achievement measures. Trait self-control and fluid reasoning showed similar relationships with school achievement, whereas only fluid reasoning was significantly associated with standardized achievement test scores. For both achievement measures, no significant interaction effects between trait self-control and fluid reasoning were found. The results highlight the utility of trait self-control for performance in high-stakes school assessment beyond fluid reasoning, but set limits to the overall value of trait self-control for achievement in standardized assessments-at least in low-stakes testing situations.

New wine in an old bottle? A facet-level perspective on the added value of Grit over BFI-2 Conscientiousness.

There is emerging consensus that Grit's two facets-perseverance of effort and consistency of interest-are best understood as facets of the Big Five dimension of Conscientiousness. However, an in-depth investigation on whether Grit's facet offer any added value over more established facets of Conscientiousness is absent from the literature. In the present study, we investigated whether Grit's facets are empirically distinguishable from three facets of Conscientiousness as conceived in the well-validated Big-Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2), namely, Organization, Responsibility, Productiveness. Moreover, we investigated whether Grit's facets show different (and possibly stronger) associations than the facets of Conscientiousness with a broad set of external criteria (age, educational attainment, monthly income, life satisfaction, mental and physical health, fluid and crystallized intelligence); as well as whether the criterion correlations of Grit's facets are incremental over Conscientiousness. Findings from two latent-variable models in a large and diverse sample (N = 1,244) indicated that the facets of Grit showed moderate to strong relationships related to each other and to the three Conscientiousness facets of the BFI-2 (.41 ≤ r ≤ .94). Grit-Perseverance was almost indistinguishable from the Productiveness facet of Conscientiousness, whereas Grit-Consistency appeared to capture something unique beyond the Conscientiousness facets. The relationships with external criteria of Grit's facets were similar in direction and size to those of the Conscientiousness facets. The results give further purchase to the view that Grit's facets can be subsumed under the Conscientiousness domain.

A New Measure of Reading Habit: Going Beyond Behavioral Frequency.

Reading habit is considered an important construct in reading research as it serves as a significant predictor of reading achievement. However, there is still no consensus on how to best measure reading habit. In recent research, it has mostly been measured as behavioral frequency; this approach neglects the fact that repeated behavior does not cover the broad content of habitual behavior-such as automaticity and the expression of one's identity. In this study, we aimed to adapt a 10-item scale on the basis of the Self-Report Habit Index by Verplanken and Orbell (2003) that is comprehensive but still economical for measuring reading habit. It was tested by drawing on a sample of N = 1,418 upper secondary school students. The scale showed good psychometric properties and the internal and external validity was supported. Moreover, the scale predicted reading achievement and decoding speed over and above reading frequency. The implications of an elaborated but still economical way of measuring reading habit are discussed giving new impetus on research on reading habit, challenging conventional approaches of traditional measures.