Incremental Validity of Character Measures Over the Big Five and Fluid intelligence in Predicting Academic Achievement

Student characteristics like grit, need for cognition, intellectual self-concept, mastery orientation, school value, and growth mindset are important predictors of academic achievement. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these proposed measures provide additional theoretical or empirical utility over established measures of general personality, such as the Big Five. Here, we examine whether character measures display incremental validity over and above the Big Five Inventory and measures of fluid intelligence when predicting academic performance in a large sample (N = 1,583) of 3rd through 8th grade students. The results indicate that multiple character measures demonstrate incremental prediction, particularly need for cognition (ΔR2=6.5% over personality, ΔR2=2.5% over personality and fluid intelligence) and school value (ΔR2=4.2% over personality). Applying regularization techniques to identify a parsimonious solution, both coefficients for need for cognition and school value remained non-zero and accounted for unique variance. The incremental predictive power of individual character measures was primarily due to common variance across the character measures (ΔR2=11.5% over personality, 9.3% over personality and fluid intelligence). Educationally-contextualized measures have utility for predicting achievement in addition to decontextualized behavioral and ability measures.