Economists from HSE University and the Southern Federal University have found that personality traits such as conscientiousness and open-mindedness help schoolchildren improve their academic performance. The study, conducted across seven countries, was the first large-scale international analysis of the impact of character traits on the academic achievement of 10 and 15-year-olds. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Educational Research.
A child's school performance can indicate their future educational level, income, and social status. Traditionally, when assessing academic success, the focus has been on cognitive abilities such as memory, logic, and attention.
However, good academic results require more than intelligence. The researchers hypothesised that pupils' personality traits—such as conscientiousness, openness to new experiences, emotional stability, and the ability to cooperate—could also play a role. To test this, Ksenia Rozhkova , Senior Research Fellow at HSE's Faculty of Economic Sciences , and Karen Avanesyan, Leading Researcher at SFU's Academy of Psychology and Pedagogy, analysed data from the OECD Survey for Social and Emotional Skills, conducted in 2019 among schoolchildren in seven countries (Russia, the USA, South Korea, Finland, Turkey, China, and Colombia).
The study examined data from over 44,000 students in two age groups: 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds. The survey assessed the development of pupils' personality traits, focusing on the Big Five non-cognitive skills: open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, cooperation, and neuroticism (or emotional instability). These traits are shaped in childhood under the influence of family and environment and tend to persist throughout much of life.
The study showed that conscientiousness and open-mindedness had the most significant positive effects on academic achievement. An increase of one standard deviation in conscientiousness raised the likelihood of being among the top 25% of students by 4 percentage points. This trait encompasses self-discipline, perseverance in completing tasks, and striving for the best possible outcome. Conscientiousness proved important across all cultural contexts. 'We see that non-cognitive skills have similar effects on academic outcomes in different cultural contexts. In all countries where such empirical studies have been conducted, conscientiousness and emotional stability consistently show a positive impact on educational and labour-market outcomes,' noted Ksenia Rozhkova, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.
The second most influential trait was openness to new experiences, open-mindedness, which increased the likelihood by 2.5 percentage points. An intriguing effect was observed with cooperation and willingness to compromise: it followed an inverted U-shaped trend. Cooperation improved academic performance up to an optimal point, after which excessive willingness to collaborate began to reduce the chances of being in the top 25%. According to the authors, this aligns with a psychological phenomenon sometimes referred to as a 'too good' trait, where certain socially approved behaviours can start to work against the individual. 'Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of finding the right balance between individual motivation to tackle tasks and the ability to work as part of a team,' explained Ksenia Rozhkova.
The authors paid particular attention to how personality traits influence the academic performance of children from different social backgrounds. Numerous studies have shown that school achievement is strongly linked to a family's financial situation and social status, which account for nearly 20% of the variation in grades.
Being in the bottom 40% of households by income level reduced a pupil's chances of becoming one of the top students by 12.5 percentage points. However, when the researchers created a model factoring in the impact of personality traits, the likelihood of a child from a low-income family ranking among the best students dropped by only 10.7 percentage points. This suggests that fostering such traits could become one of the key drivers of social mobility, helping to mitigate economic inequality and enabling children from less affluent families to achieve better academic and life outcomes.
The authors emphasise that these findings carry significant implications for education policy. They demonstrate that developing personality traits can serve as an effective tool for reducing educational inequality. Importantly, such qualities can be successfully cultivated through school curricula and educational initiatives.
