European Journal of Personality

The literature relevant to the combined area of personality and education and learning is summarized, covering almost a century of research and theorizing. Different topics considered important from the aspect of education and learning or from the aspect of personality are represented. For personality this means that broad domains such as motivation and disposition are represented, and that reference is made to topics such as achievement motivation, character education, and goal orientation. The first few decades of the century are coloured by the unitary character‐derived construct persistence of motives (Webb, 1915), which has an inherent connection to learning and education. The last three or four decades are characterized by a growing consensus in the personality field about basic constructs such as those represented by the Big‐Five factors. In addition, emerging issues covering the relationship between personality and intelligence and personality, motivation, and achievement‐orientation are described. This review is necessarily incomplete, but most of the central topics in the field of personality and education have been given a place.

The objective of this research is to analyse the relationships between personality traits, learning strategies, and performance. Two multivariate studies (N=139 and N=92) were conducted. In both studies factor analyses of the learning strategies yielded two factors. One factor, labelled, ‘learning discipline’, correlated highly with the Conscientiousness scale and the other factor, labelled, ‘elaboration’, correlated with the Openness of Experience scale. In Study 1, about 17 per cent of the variance in college grades was accounted for by personality scales and learning strategies. In Study 2, learning strategies accounted for about 31 per cent of the variance in college grades. Path analyses showed that the relations between basic personality traits and grades were mediated by the learning strategies.

In an attempt to illuminate the interrelatedness of noncognitive and cognitive domains—or, more pointedly, of affection, conation, and cognition—emphasis is placed on variables that not only operate across these domains but are also potentially integrative. Prominent among such variables are personal styles, particularly cognitive styles. The properties and problems of cognitive styles are examined, with special emphasis on field independence versus field sensitivity and on two stylistic dimensions of attentional scanning. The role of cognitive styles as both competence variables and performance variables is addressed, along with the difficulty of disentangling style from ability because of reciprocal determinism in their development. The educational implications of cognitive styles are explored, especially as they bear on the problem of the match between student characteristics and educational experiences and on the value‐laden nature of style‐based pedagogical decisions.

The aim of this article is to examine the interaction between personality and learning in order to find clues to the role that a student's personality plays in the process of adaptation and learning. To scrutinize such an expansive area requires that I cover a lot of territory in a small space, condensing many components and processes. Wherever meaningful, I will direct readers to sources that provide greater depth of coverage. The article is divided into four sections. The first section covers personality theories and models based on a structure‐oriented view of personality. The second section addresses personality from a process‐oriented viewpoint. Current research findings that relate personality characteristics explicitly to learning processes, strategy use, and metacognition are briefly reviewed. The third section goes one step further and discusses second‐generation process‐oriented personality models. These models are applied to student behaviour during actual learning episodes. A general outline of my model of the adaptable learning process is given and it is argued that the quality of subjective experience is not just an outcome of personality characteristics. It is influenced by student * situation transactions. In the fourth section, conclusions and suggestions for future research are given.

In this study Holland's RIASEC Model of vocational personalities and the Five‐Factor Model of personality are used (i) to assess individual differences among study majors and (ii) to predict educational achievement. A sample of 934 last‐year students who enrolled in different academic majors filled out Dutch/Flemish adaptations of the NEO‐PI‐R (Costa and McCrae, 1992) and the Self‐Directed Search (Holland, 1977; 1979). The results show that both models are useful to describe differences among different majors. Conscientiousness proves to be a general predictor of grades and study career. For the other Big Five dimensions, except for Agreeableness, major and/or gender specific relationships with educational outcomes are observed. Holland's interest dimensions are not related to educational achievement, except for some moderate gender or major specific correlations with the Investigative and the Artistic scales. Suggestions for future research regarding educational streaming and counselling are discussed.

Literature is reviewed suggesting that a child's personality determines to a large extent his or her reaction to specific methods of teaching, and even to the whole ethos and atmosphere of the teaching situation. Thus, extraverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of discovery learning, while introverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of reception learning. The apparent lack of difference in achievement in groups taught by these methods hides the large individual differences factor that appears in the interaction term. It is suggested that facts of this kind should be of considerable concern to those who design our courses for future teachers, and for teachers generally. We owe our children care in the design of methods for teaching, and personality differences play an important part in such design.

A commentary is given on the seven articles in this special issue. Ordered in terms of interest and importance this readers preference list begins with the broad review articles by Boekaerts, De Raad and Schouwenburg, and Messick, in this order. Next comes the curious article by Eysenck. It is curious because it so clearly reveals his continuing refusal to accept Conscientiousness or W as an independent factor of personality. How to open a closed mind?

The three research articles left this reader in a state of depression, mostly because of the negative correlations found in two of the three studies between students self‐ratings on Openness and their grades obtained in the early years of University schooling.

In this article, I consider first the questions about the relation between personality and education that we have, to a large extent, answered, and then the questions that we have yet to answer, and, in large part, even to ask.