TY  - JOUR
A1  - Westphal, Andrea
A1  - Vock, Miriam
A1  - Kretschmann, Julia
T1  - Unravelling the relationship between teacher-assigned grades, student personality, and standardized test scores
T2  - Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation
N2  - The Big Five personality traits play a major role in student achievement. As such, there is consistent evidence that students that are more conscientious receive better teacher-assigned grades in secondary school. However, research often does not support the claim that students that are more conscientious similarly achieve higher scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests. Based on the Invest-and-Accrue Model, we argue that conscientiousness explains to some extent why certain students receive better grades despite similar academic accomplishments (i.e., achieving similar scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests). Therefore, the present study examines to what extent the relationship between student personality and teacher-assigned grades consists of direct as opposed to indirect associations (via subject-specific standardized test scores). We used a representative sample of 14,710 ninth-grade students to estimate these direct and indirect pathways in mathematics and German. Structural equation models showed that test scores explained between 8 and 11% of the variance in teacher-assigned grades in mathematics and German. The Big Five personality traits in students additionally explained between 8 and 10% of the variance in grades. Finally, the personality-grade relationship consisted of direct (0.02 | β| ≤ 0.27) and indirect associations via test scores (0.01 | β| ≤ 0.07). Conscientiousness explained discrepancies between teacher-assigned grades and students’ scores in domain-specific standardized tests to a greater extent than any of the other Big Five personality traits. Our findings suggest that students that are more conscientious may invest more effort to accomplish classroom goals, but fall short of mastery.
KW  - Big Five
KW  - student personality
KW  - teacher-assigned grades
KW  - grading practice
KW  - conscientiousness
KW  - mathematics
KW  - German
KW  - secondary school
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/52301
SN  - 1664-1078
IS  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -