Scientists identify personality traits that help schoolchildren succeed academically
Economists from HSE University and the Southern Federal University have found that personality traits such as conscientiousness and open-mindedness help schoolchildren improve their academic performance. The study, conducted across seven countries, was the first large-scale international analysis of the impact of character traits on the academic achievement of 10 and 15-year-olds. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Educational Research.
A child’s school performance can indicate their future educational level, income, and social status. Traditionally, when assessing academic success, the focus has been on cognitive abilities such as memory, logic, and attention.
However, good academic results require more than intelligence. The researchers hypothesised that pupils’ personality traits—such as conscientiousness, openness to new experiences, emotional stability, and the ability to cooperate—could also play a role. To test this, Ksenia Rozhkova, Senior Research Fellow at HSE’s Faculty of Economic Sciences, and Karen Avanesyan, Leading Researcher at SFU’s Academy of Psychology and Pedagogy, analysed data from the OECD Survey for Social and Emotional Skills, conducted in 2019 among schoolchildren in seven countries (Russia, the USA, South Korea, Finland, Turkey, China, and Colombia).
The study examined data from over 44,000 students in two age groups: 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds. The survey assessed the development of pupils’ personality traits, focusing on the Big Five non-cognitive skills: open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, cooperation, and neuroticism (or emotional instability). These traits are shaped in childhood under the influence of family and environment and tend to persist throughout much of life.
The study showed that conscientiousness and open-mindedness had the most significant positive effects on academic achievement. An increase of one standard deviation in conscientiousness raised the likelihood of being among the top 25% of students by 4 percentage points. This trait encompasses self-discipline, perseverance in completing tasks, and striving for the best possible outcome. Conscientiousness proved important across all cultural contexts. ‘We see that non-cognitive skills have similar effects on academic outcomes in different cultural contexts. In all countries where such empirical studies have been conducted, conscientiousness and emotional stability consistently show a positive impact on educational and labour-market outcomes,’ noted Ksenia Rozhkova, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.
The second most influential trait was openness to new experiences, open-mindedness, which increased the likelihood by 2.5 percentage points. An intriguing effect was observed with cooperation and willingness to compromise: it followed an inverted U-shaped trend. Cooperation improved academic performance up to an optimal point, after which excessive willingness to collaborate began to reduce the chances of being in the top 25%. According to the authors, this aligns with a psychological phenomenon sometimes referred to as a ‘too good’ trait, where certain socially approved behaviours can start to work against the individual. ‘Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of finding the right balance between individual motivation to tackle tasks and the ability to work as part of a team,’ explained Ksenia Rozhkova.
The authors paid particular attention to how personality traits influence the academic performance of children from different social backgrounds. Numerous studies have shown that school achievement is strongly linked to a family’s financial situation and social status, which account for nearly 20% of the variation in grades.
Being in the bottom 40% of households by income level reduced a pupil’s chances of becoming one of the top students by 12.5 percentage points. However, when the researchers created a model factoring in the impact of personality traits, the likelihood of a child from a low-income family ranking among the best students dropped by only 10.7 percentage points. This suggests that fostering such traits could become one of the key drivers of social mobility, helping to mitigate economic inequality and enabling children from less affluent families to achieve better academic and life outcomes.
The authors emphasise that these findings carry significant implications for education policy. They demonstrate that developing personality traits can serve as an effective tool for reducing educational inequality. Importantly, such qualities can be successfully cultivated through school curricula and educational initiatives.
Journal
International Journal of Educational Research
Article Title
The effect of non-cognitive skills on academic performance: does it vary by socio-economic status?
Competition in the classroom: When incentive systems change character
Many companies try to use incentive systems to increase the motivation and effectiveness of their employees. These systems often resemble competitions: for example, whoever has the highest sales figures at the end of the month receives a bonus.
Such competitions can certainly increase productivity. But they also have a downside: scientific studies have shown that they can, for example, worsen cooperation between colleagues in the short term.
But what happens in the long term to people who are exposed to such competitive pressure over a longer period of time? Do they get used to the competitive pressure, or does it even change their personality?
A team led by Professor Fabian Kosse from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) in Würzburg has now investigated these very questions for the first time: ‘We studied how a prolonged competitive environment influences the prosocial behaviour of young people, i.e. their willingness to help and their mutual trust,’ says Kosse, who heads the JMU Chair of Data Science in Business and Economics.
Helpfulness and Trust Decline
The results of the study give pause for thought: two years of intense competition significantly reduce helpfulness and trust among young people. And not just in the short term – even four years after the end of the competition, the effects are still there. ‘So prolonged competition not only changes situational behaviour. It also influences personality development,’ says Kosse.
The study was conducted in collaboration with Ranjita Rajan from the Karta Initiative (Oxford) and Michela Tincani from University College London. It has been published in the renowned Journal of the European Economic Association.
How the Results Were Obtained
The researchers conducted a large-scale field study at schools in Chile. According to Fabian Kosse, the quantity and quality of the available educational data there is very good.
For the study, the scientists used a programme introduced by the Chilean government (PACE). It was implemented at selected high schools to bring more young people from socially disadvantaged families to universities.
The programme guarantees a place at university for the top 15 percent of students in each school. Those who belong to this group no longer have to take the otherwise mandatory central entrance exam for universities. This is very important for young people from socially disadvantaged families, as very few of them make it to university through the regular, centralised admission system.
The incentive to be among the top 15 percent is therefore strong. However, the long-term competition that the programme sparks in schools is also strong: it is a competition that lasts two years, because who is among the best is not decided by a single final exam, but by all their performance over the last school years.
Against this background, the researchers were active at 64 PACE schools and 64 control schools where the PACE programme is not in place. A total of more than 5,000 students were involved. Crucial to the validity of the results was the fact that the schools participating in the PACE programme and those serving as control schools were selected at random – in other words, it was a genuine experiment with treatment and control groups.
For their study, the researchers evaluated data collected by the Chilean government to evaluate the PACE programme. They also conducted detailed surveys of students, teachers and school administrators that they developed themselves.
The questions concerned the school atmosphere and included, for example, ‘How much do you agree with the following statement: There is a lot of competition for the best grades in my class.’ Above all, the questions focused on prosocial behaviour such as altruism, reciprocity and trust (‘How willing are you to help others without expecting anything in return?’).
What can be Done to Counteract the Negative Consequences?
In its publication, the team proposes measures that could potentially prevent or reduce the prosociality reducing consequences of PACE and similar competition-based incentive systems.
Change the rules of the competition: It might help to determine the ranking of the best students not within a specific school, but within the group of all socially disadvantaged students in a specific region of the country. In such a system, the internal competitive pressure within the school would be lower.
Creating cooperation instead of competition: If the competition takes place across schools, the resulting mindset of ‘us together against the other schools’ could improve cooperation and atmosphere and even increase prosociality.
Journal
Journal of the European Economic Association
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
The persistent effect of competition on prosociality
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