Students’ Personality Relates to Experienced Variability in State Academic Self-Concept

Attaining a positive academic self-concept (ASC) is linked to many desirable educational outcomes. Research on which student attributes relate to the formation of ASC is therefore considered to be central. Past research on the association between personality traits and ASC has taken an interindividual perspective, while the intraindividual perspective has been disregarded. The present research explored the relation between students’ Big Five traits and intraindividual variability in state general-school ASC in everyday school life for the first time using intensive longitudinal data. We drew on N=294 German ninth and tenth graders who completed a three-week e-diary and a previously presented 60-item Big Five questionnaire (BFI-2; Danner et al., 2016; Soto & John, 2017) assessing Open-Mindedness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Negative Emotionality as well as their respective subfacets (i.e., resulting in 15 subfacets). To assess state ASC, students completed three items after every single lesson across four different subjects (resulting in Mlessons = 21.12). We ran six mixed-effects location scale models: one specified with all five Big Five domains, and five (one for each Big Five domain) with the subfacets as predictors of intraindividual variability in state ASC. We found that Open-Mindedness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Negative Emotionality as well as at least one subfacet of each Big Five trait were significant predictors of levels of state ASC independently of students’ gender and reasoning ability, and the narrower subfacets Organization (Conscientiousness) and Depression (Negative Emotionality) predicted variability in state ASC independently of students’ gender and reasoning ability. These findings thus provide first evidence that students’ ASC undergoes short-term fluctuations from school lesson to school lesson and that this intraindividual variability can be partly explained by students’ personality. Our results thus contribute to a more complete map of the formation of ASC and the role of personality therein