Big Five Personality Theory Essay

Personality may be defined as stable individual characteristics or attributes that exhibit particular patterns of behaviour, cognitions, and emotions (Allik, 2012; Heaven & Cairrochi, 2012; Vesealka, Just, Jang, Johnson, & Vernon, 2012; Just, 2011; Komarraju et al., 2009). Among the many theories that correlate personality and academic performance, two theories stand out and they are Eysenck and Big Five personality theory. In this study, Big Five is utilised and it has five dimensions of human personality, that is, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Students’ intellectual ability has been found to highly correlate to academic performance, but it accounts for less than 50% of the variance in the academic performance. It means there are other causative factors to the academic performance (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2007). Two of the other factors are personality and learning style which are significant predictors of the students’ academic performance (Vasileva-Stojanovska et al., 2015). The study by Bidjerano and Dai (2007) lent support to a positive link between learning strategies exercised by college students and habitual behaviours

Students with this personality trait are open to fresh experiences, feel comfortable seeking help and participate in peer learning in their academic endeavours. Openness is positively correlated with approaches to learning (Vermetten, Lodewijks, & Vermunt, 2001), learning motivation (Tempelaar, Gijselaers, van der Loeff, & Nijhuis, 2007), and critical thinking (Bidjerano & Dai, 2007). According to Moldasheva and Mahmood’s study (2014), students who are conscientious and open to new experiences employed extra learning strategies and these two personality traits are highly correlated to each other. That is, openness students may have high scores in cognitive and teaching