Incremental validity of character measures over the big five inventory in predicting academic achievement

Educationally contextualized character skills, such as grit, need for cognition, intellectual self-concept, mastery orientation, school value, and growth mindset, are important predictors of academic achievement. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these proposed measures provide additional theoretical or empirical utility over established measures of general personality, such as the Big Five. Here, we examine whether character measures display incremental validity over and above the Big Five Inventory and measures of cognitive ability when predicting academic performance. Using a large sample (N = 1,054) of 3rd through 8th grade students, we applied structural equation modeling to partition unique and common predictive power of character measures. The results indicate that multiple character measures demonstrate incremental prediction over and above the Big Five Inventory and cognitive ability. The character measures of need for cognition (ΔR2=7.3% over personality, ΔR2=6.4% over personality and cognitive ability) and school value (ΔR2=8.0%, ΔR2=5.6%) displayed the largest incremental validity. Furthermore, the incremental predictive power of character was shared within the domain of character, except for a unique effect of school value. Multiple psychological dimensions are uniquely associated with academic achievement