Within the realm of social and personality psychology, there is an emphasis on acknowledging, understanding, and utilizing five categorized personality traits found, to varying extents, in every individual. Fundamental to understanding the material within, are the essentials of psychology’s “The Big Five.” As adapted from the work of McCrae and Costa (1986, 2008), the mnemonic “CANOE” assists in quick recall of these primary attributes: “Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion.” Consider that an evaluation scoring high levels of each spectrum would indicate strong traits of an individual’s: Conscientiousness as “organized, careful, [and] disciplined;” Agreeableness as “soft-hearted, trusting, [and] helpful;” Neuroticism as “anxious,…show more content… However, they note previous findings also factor in “extraversion” levels to also apply to broader educational endeavors. The authors hypothesize that conscientiousness plays a stronger role in economics students’ success when paired with a higher level of agreeableness (p. 383). However, they note that agreeableness itself may not as clearly indicate future success; instead, conscientiousness is the stronger indicator of the two, if remaining character traits measure at similar levels (p. 383). Using students’ final grades as well as self-reported indicators of The Big Five, Chowdhury and Amin assess the independent variables (conscientiousness and agreeableness, specifically) in direct relation to the dependent variable (alphabetic grades assigned a basic, numeric value). The educators’ findings support their hypothesis that conscientiousness is most indicative of scholastic achievements when paired with moderate to high levels of
