Personality factors in elementary school children: Contributions to academic performance over and above executive functions?

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Abstract

Unique contributions of Big Five personality factors to academic performance in young elementary school children were explored. Extraversion and Openness (labeled “Culture” in our study) uniquely contributed to academic performance, over and above the contribution of executive functions in first and second grade children (N = 446). Well established associations between Conscientiousness and academic performance, however, could only be replicated with regard to zero-order correlations. Executive functions (inhibition, updating, and shifting), for their part, proved to be powerful predictors of academic performance. Results were to some extent dependent on the criterion with which academic performance was measured: Both personality factors had stronger effects on grades than on standardized achievement tests, whereas the opposite was true for executive functions. Finally, analyses on gender differences revealed that Extraversion and Openness/Culture played a more dominant role in girls than in boys, but only regarding grades.

Highlights

► Unique contributions of Big Five factors to academic achievement were explored. ► Effects were only found for Extraversion and Openness in 1st and 2nd graders. ► Over and above the contribution of executive functions ► Personality had stronger effects on grades than on school achievement tests. ► Personality factors played a more important role in girls than in boys.

Section snippets

Participants

The total sample consisted of 446 children (49% girls). The younger children attended Grade 1 (n = 209, mean age = 7.7 years, SD = 0.4, 46% girls) and the older attended Grade 2 (n = 237, mean age = 8.5 years, SD = 0.3, 51% girls). The children were recruited from 124 classrooms in 59 public elementary schools from different urban and rural regions of Switzerland. Parents and teachers gave their written informed consent. Language of instruction was German, although the language background of 17.7% of the

Results

Table 1 presents means and standard deviations as well as zero-order correlations for personality factors, EF, and AP. As expected, inter-correlations among the Big Five were modest, and girls were rated significantly higher than boys on all personality factors; except for Extraversion, where no gender differences were found. As there were no associations of personality factors with age, data of the two age groups were collapsed for further analyses. Moreover, low to moderate correlations

Discussion

An incremental impact of personality above and beyond cognitive abilities has consistently been confirmed, although empirical evidence is still mixed concerning the specific role that each of the Big Five factors plays in determining AP, especially in elementary school children. The present study aimed to shed light on the role personality factors play in first and second graders' AP. With regard to Poropat's meta-analysis (2009), all Big Five were assumed to be associated with AP in young

Acknowledgment

This research was financially supported by the Jacobs Foundation Zurich (Grant “Transition to School” to the last author) and was approved by the Phil. - Hum. Faculty Ethic Committee, University of Bern, Switzerland. We wish to thank the participating children, parents, teachers and the administrative authorities of the participating schools for their cooperation as well as the research assistants and master students for their help with the data collection.

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