The relationship between personality and within-person within-semester performance variability

Abstract

Most studies of student performance focus on the between-person measures, such as GPA, which ignore the within-person variability across a time period and meaningful differences in performance at the individual level. Operationalizing grade variability as the standard deviation of grades in a single course across a semester, we explored a number of personal predictors, including personality, test anxiety, procrastination, and self-efficacy, of students' performance consistency over time. The results indicate that industriousness and intellect aspects negatively predict grade variability and the openness aspect positively predicts grade variability. Therefore, students with a high level of industriousness and intellect tend to perform more consistently and those who are high on openness tend to exhibit a more inconsistent performance pattern across a semester. Our study taps into the temporal stability aspect of student performance and carries implications for potential intervention opportunities for students low on industriousness and intellect, and high on openness.