Personality Type, Self-Efficacy, and Learning Style Preference: A Quantitative Study of Ninth-Grade Students in Missouri

Personality types, learning style preferences, and self-efficacy domains of ninth-grade students in southwest Missouri were explored in this study. The study was conducted to shed light on needs assessments used to identify learner differences due to the rise of mixed-ability classrooms. Five selected schools participated in the study during the 2019–2020 school year. The Big Five Personality survey was used to identify the dominant personality type of each participant: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism. The Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children (SEQ-C) was used to identify the dominant self-efficacy domain for each participant: academic, social, or emotional. The Thinking and Learning Styles survey was used to identify the dominant learning style preference for each participant: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. A total of 148 high school students completed the survey. Following a quantitative analysis using the chi-square goodness-of-fit test, significant differences between personality type and learning style preference, self-efficacy and learning style preference, and personality type and self-efficacy were found. The most-significant difference between personality type and learning style preference was agreeableness and kinesthetic. The most-significant difference between self-efficacy and learning style preference was social and kinesthetic. Lastly, the most-significant difference between personality type and self-efficacy was agreeableness and social. The data collected and conclusions drawn from this study will help researchers build on an increasing trend of learner diversity and will enable educators to employ the pedagogy of differentiated instruction with fidelity