Westphal Andrea, Vock Miriam, Kretschmann Julia
Department of Education, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 19;12:627440. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.627440. eCollection 2021.
The Big Five personality traits play a major role in student achievement. As such, there is consistent evidence that students that are more conscientious receive better teacher-assigned grades in secondary school. However, research often does not support the claim that students that are more conscientious similarly achieve higher scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests. Based on the Invest-and-Accrue Model, we argue that conscientiousness explains to some extent why certain students receive better grades despite similar academic accomplishments (i.e., achieving similar scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests). Therefore, the present study examines to what extent the relationship between student personality and teacher-assigned grades consists of direct as opposed to indirect associations (via subject-specific standardized test scores). We used a representative sample of 14,710 ninth-grade students to estimate these direct and indirect pathways in mathematics and German. Structural equation models showed that test scores explained between 8 and 11% of the variance in teacher-assigned grades in mathematics and German. The Big Five personality traits in students additionally explained between 8 and 10% of the variance in grades. Finally, the personality-grade relationship consisted of direct (0.02 | β| ≤ 0.27) and indirect associations via test scores (0.01 | β| ≤ 0.07). Conscientiousness explained discrepancies between teacher-assigned grades and students' scores in domain-specific standardized tests to a greater extent than any of the other Big Five personality traits. Our findings suggest that students that are more conscientious may invest more effort to accomplish classroom goals, but fall short of mastery.
大五人格特质在学生成绩中起着重要作用。因此，有一致的证据表明，在中学里，更有责任心的学生获得的教师评定成绩更好。然而，研究往往不支持这样的说法，即更有责任心的学生在特定领域的标准化成就测试中同样能取得更高的分数。基于投资与积累模型，我们认为责任心在一定程度上解释了为什么某些学生尽管学业成绩相似（即在特定领域的标准化成就测试中取得相似分数）却能获得更好的成绩。因此，本研究考察了学生个性与教师评定成绩之间的关系在多大程度上是直接关联而非间接关联（通过特定学科的标准化考试成绩）。我们使用了14710名九年级学生的代表性样本，来估计数学和德语学科中的这些直接和间接路径。结构方程模型表明，考试成绩解释了数学和德语学科中教师评定成绩差异的8%至11%。学生的大五人格特质还额外解释了成绩差异的8%至10%。最后，个性与成绩的关系包括直接关联（0.02≤|β|≤0.27）和通过考试成绩的间接关联（0.01≤|β|≤0.07）。责任心比其他任何一种大五人格特质都更能解释教师评定成绩与学生在特定领域标准化测试成绩之间的差异。我们的研究结果表明，更有责任心的学生可能会投入更多努力来实现课堂目标，但未能达到精通的程度。
