Other-rated personality and academic performance:Evidence and implications is the title of a new interesting and helpful meta-analysis that finds conscientiousness and curiosity are more important than natural intelligence for student academic success.

It also found that teachers were much more accurate evaluators of the levels present of those two qualities than the students themselves, and supports the idea of teachers intentionally cultivating those abilities (thought their suggestions seemed pretty weak to me).

The conscientiousness part is not anything new, but the paper does provide a helpful summary of research findings that support its importance.

The specific role of curiosity, though, I thought was particularly intriguing. It supports my plan to develop some lesson plans designed to help students be more intentional about developing it among themselves, and this study will be a part of them.

I’ll be adding this post to both The Best Posts On Curiosity and to The Best Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Resources.

Here’s an excerpt from the study, and you can also read another summary of it at the PsyBlog:

Conscientiousness