Partial Least Square Modeling of Personality Traits and Academic Achievement in Physics

Abstract

Within the purview of educational settings, students possess some unique traits which make them react in an unexpected manner to the learning environment. Students are not only unique in terms of personality characteristics, family background, age and gender, they also showed diverse states of mind and enthusiastic reactions to the environment. Therefore, this study modelled the Big Five personality traits and academic achievement of students in Lagos State, Nigeria. A non-experimental design of scale development research type was adopted. A sample of 480 senior secondary school III students selected through multi-stage sampling procedure across the education districts 2 of Lagos State. Student’s Personality Traits Scale (SPTS) and Physics Achievement Test (PAT) were deployed to capture the needed data after subjecting them to exploratory factor analysis using the psych package implemented in R programming language and item calibration of Item Response Theory. Data were analysed using Partial Least Square (PLS) path modelling to test the proposed model. Findings showed, there was significant direct positive relationship between the five personality traits and academic achievement in physics with (β= 0.23, t = 1.99, p < 0.05). Also, there was significant negative causal linkage of gender on physics achievement with (β = -0.10, t = 2.02, p < 0.05), although, its moderating effect was insignificant between the two constructs with (β = 0.02, t = 0.75, p > 0.05). Among other recommendations, physics teachers were enjoined to pay due attention to the development of positive traits among their students.