By Heather Shelton and Morgan Buerke, Editors
Senior Kaylee McPhee knows what it feels like to have school success.
She is a National Honor Society member and a National Merit Semifinalist, and she has been recognized by the school board for high PSAE scores and for her leadership.
McPhee, unlike many, has figured out what she needs to do in order to be successful in school and in order to gain her successes.
“I attribute my school success to good teachers who encouraged me to challenge myself,” McPhee said. “I’m going to be able to handle college classes on my own now.”
The Road to Success
Every year Kaneland works toward its mission: to graduate all students college, career and community ready. It includes being successful not just in school, but in the real world of work.
This is what brings teachers and students to the golden question: what makes some students successful and others not?
It’s an issue psychologists continuously dig deeper into. A recent study performed by the University of Minnesota drew conclusions about specific personality traits and how they lead to success.
Inside the Study
University of Minnesota’s study investigated which traits contribute to learning and performance in medical schools. It consisted of students who had been instructed to take a personality test at the beginning of the study, and their success was measured in terms of school performance grades over a seven-year time period.
One of these personality traits is conscientiousness, Conscientiousness is something researchers define as a fundamental personality trait that influences whether people set and
keep long-range goals, deliberate over choices or behave impulsively, and take seriously obligations to others. It is related to high grades, but other personality traits can contribute to this, according to the study. Extraverted people were also found to have received high grades in later years, as did people who were more agreeable.
University of Minnesota psychology professor Deniz Ones, co-author of the study, said that psychologists who have been doing research for years are thinking about incorporating personality tests into the medical admissions process in order to predict which candidates will succeed.
“They know how personality tests work and which measures are supported by scientific evidence. But more importantly, they also know how personality measurements can be best incorporated with other test data to create optimally useful admissions systems,” she said.
The Big Five
According to another study done by Melissa C. O’Connor and Sampo V. Paunone from the University of Western Ontario, the five personality traits that correlate the most with success are conscientiousness, the openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion.
Conscientiousness
The first personality trait is conscientiousness, which has a consistent connection to academic success.
Organization skills carry on after high school into college and life. Organization is key because not only does it help students stay on track, but it also allows them to take on multiple tasks and complete each one accordingly.
Biology teacher Jennifer O’Hara said that she saw a link between organization and success in her classes.
“[Organization] drastically helps students with study skills and helps them find the stuff they need when they need it,” she said.
According to a survey conducted of 100 randomly-selected Kaneland students, a hardworking student is a student who does their homework everyday, constantly gets good grades, studies a lot, does all their homework, visits their teachers during STEP and contributes a sufficient amount of work to not only individual projects, but also group projects.
“A student who comes to class with that ‘willing to learn’ attitude is the student who believes they can do it,” business teacher Tammie Conn said.
Counselor Cynthia Violett says that it’s very important to take the time to study.
“I feel like students don’t take the time to study,” she said. “If they don’t study the information, it’s hard to retain it, and it will affect them in future courses.”
Conn said that being an achievement-oriented student depends on a couple factors.
“I think that comes from values at home or ones they have grown up with,” she said.
Openness to Experience
Openness to experience has helped predict GPA, overall grades and class participation grades. It mainly refers to students that are willing to try new things.
McPhee believes that being open-minded is crucial to learning because it make students more likely to ask questions.
O’Connor and Paunone found that Openness to experience is mostly correlated positively with final grades and other items.
Their study explained that this was correlated toward the intelligence of people who were more open to experiences. The study also specifically states that there may be more unknown variables that explain the correlation further.
Neuroticism
On the contrary, neuroticism has been found to harm students’ GPA.
According to O’Hara, to be neurotic means to be overly focused on something or negatively focused on certain parts of a person’s life.
“It doesn’t allow them to focus on a variety of things,” O’Hara said.
Neurotic people were found to be less emotionally stable and therefore perform worse academically than those that are more emotionally stable.
O’Connor and Paunone’s study explain this conclusion was mostly due to anxiety.
Their study states that “under academic evaluation conditions, neurotic individuals are thought to experience anxiety and stress, impairing their performance.”
However, their study also suggested that the correlation was small stating that, because their results were small in range, “Neuroticism may not be a strong determinant of individual differences in scholastic achievement in general.”
Agreeableness
O’Hara said that many things contribute to being agreeable including a pleasant personality and ability to be hard-working and their willingness to go out on a limb.
“It allows them to build new relationships and develop new connections,” she said.
O’Connor and Paunone’s study found that Agreeableness was positively correlated with GPA and final course grades but it produced mixed results.
Overall, the study took on the stance that agreeableness was the least predictable and the least legitimate factor in determining school success.
Extraversion
Extraversion can either harm or help with a student’s overall school success. O’Connor and Paunone found extraversion to harm GPA and grades on psychology and statistics tests because introverts spending more time studying while extraverts spend more time socializing.
Yet it was also positively associated with classroom participation and therefore helped academic success.
“Early on it seems [to be viewed as] hyperactivity rather than later, when it’s seen as a skill in the business world,” said O’Hara.
McPhee, however, thinks there are other reasons for the correlation.
“In school, an extrovert will pay less attention to their studies and struggle. In the real world, an extrovert will be popular, ‘well-adjusted’ and experience success,” she said. “The general public has placed a taboo on introversion and has a significant distaste for intellectualism. The general population has made it impossible for ‘nerds’ to be well-regarded, even though ‘nerds’ often become hugely successful in their less flashy way.”
Violett said that success depends on the person and the peer group. “I’ve had students who’ve had friends who motivated them, and I’ve had students in a peer group that isn’t motivating,” she said.