Mainly Openness: The relationship between the Big Five personality traits and learning approaches

In order to examine the relationship between broad personality traits and learning approaches, 852 university students completed the NEO-FFI [Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI): Professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources] and SPQ [Biggs, J. B. (1987). The Study Process Questionnaire manual. Victoria: Australian Council for Educational Research], which assess personality and learning approaches, respectively. Seven previous studies were used to generate hypotheses on the relationship between these two measures, but only the positive link between Openness to Experience and Deep learning was supported by both correlational and structural equation modelling tests. Openness was also found to be negatively linked to Surface learning, but other Big Five traits were not saliently associated with learning approaches. Results indicate that the overlap between learning approaches and personality traits is lower than previously suggested. Implications are discussed.