Associations between students’ conscientiousness, individual interest, and academic achievement have been extensively explored. Rieger et. al (2022) noticed that few studies have taken conscientiousness and individual interest together into consideration when predicting educational outcomes. While both individual interests (context-specific) and conscientiousness (domain-general, an enduring, consistent personality trait) impact students’ academic effort, they are quite different in how they facilitate students’ engagement in academic-related activities. Conscientious students view any challenges as an opportunity to overcome obstacles while students with an individual interest will have an urge to expand their knowledge or try to overcome a specific challenge that they find energizing. Few studies have suggested a combined effect of conscientiousness and individual interest on academic effort, to further explore this pattern, Rieger et al. conducted two experiments to examine the interaction between the two factors.  

Rieger et. al first tested whether conscientiousness and interest were independently related to academic effort. The data were retrieved from a large longitudinal school achievement study that encompassed four-time points (from Grades 5 to 8) and involved about 3000 students. Individual interest (e.g. “working on tasks (German, math, English)  are fun for me”), perceived academic effort (e.g. “I do my best when it comes to (German, Math, English)” in math, German, and English were assessed. Conscientiousness was measured with both student and parent reports. Results revealed that levels of academic effort in Math, German, and English were positively correlated with conscientiousness as well as individual effort over time. However, while conscientiousness remained constant over time, the researcher noticed that the individual interest slightly decreased. One possible explanation for this pattern is the difficulty of maintaining subject-specific interest in the long run. In addition, the two factors moderated each other’s effects on the level of academic effort. For instance, if a student is very conscientious but not interested in math, the positive effect of conscientiousness may compensate for low interest, and thus this student’s effort in math may be no different than a student who is very interested in math but not conscientious. 

Reiger et al’s study provides several implications for both parents and educators. While conscientiousness and individual interest can compensate for each other’s effect on academic effort, it is still important to have a balance between not only conscientiousness and interest given that the two factors facilitate different ways of approaching academic activities. For example, when a child is asking their parents or teachers to let them pursue their interests, the parents and teachers may want to remind the child that eventually things might get harder than expected, hence helping the child develop both conscientiousness and interest to overcome challenges in the future. In relation to EPIC’s research studies, Reiger et al.’s work point to some future research directions including how conscientiousness moderates the relationship between failure and persistence and how repetitive failures affect a student’s interest and academic effort. With a greater understanding of perseverance and the factors that influence it, EPIC can find ways to help students develop resilience toward failures to improve their chances of achieving future success.

If you are interested in reading further about Reiger et al.’s study, check out the link to retrieve the journal article: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475222000342

This post was written by Emma Hong.

Reference:

Rieger, S., Göllner, R., Spengler, M., Trautwein, U., Nagengast, B., & Roberts, B. W. (2022). The persistence of students’ academic effort: The unique and combined effects of conscientiousness and individual interest. Learning and Instruction, 80, 1-9.