Personality
Do character strengths help students do well at school?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Students who described themselves as more persevering, prudent and hopeful behaved better in class according to teachers, and that better classroom behaviour partly accounted for their higher achievement.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Two cross-sectional studies: self-reported character strengths correlated with teacher-rated positive classroom behaviour and achievement, with bootstrapped mediation tests
- N
- Two separate samples: Study 1, 179 primary-school students; Study 2, 199 secondary-school students. The supplied text omits Study 1's Methods section, so Study 1 procedures are known only from the abstract and later summaries
- Population
- Swiss German-speaking schoolchildren: primary students (mean age about 11.6) and secondary students in grades 7-9 (mean age about 14.4)
- Outcome
- Teacher-rated positive classroom behaviour; school achievement (teacher-rated overall achievement in Study 1; school-reported grades in academic, maths/German and non-academic subjects in Study 2)
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Key findings
In primary school, 15 of 24 strengths correlated with positive classroom behaviour and 14 with achievement, and the strengths together explained about a fifth of the variance in each; for most strengths the link to achievement ran through classroom behaviour. In secondary school the pattern was weaker but similar: perseverance, prudence, self-regulation, social intelligence and hope related to classroom behaviour, eight strengths related to academic GPA, and the strengths explained 14.8% extra variance in GPA. No strength correlated with grades in art, music or PE. Across both samples perseverance, prudence and hope were tied to both behaviour and achievement, with perseverance and prudence fully mediated by classroom behaviour.
Methodology
In two samples of Swiss students - 179 in primary school and 199 in secondary school - students completed the VIA-Youth questionnaire measuring 24 character strengths such as perseverance, hope, gratitude and humour. Teachers rated each student's positive classroom behaviour (diligence, reliability, consideration for others). Achievement was a teacher rating in the primary sample and actual school grades, split into academic and non-academic subjects, in the secondary sample. Mediation analyses tested whether strengths related to achievement through classroom behaviour.
Limitations
Both studies are cross-sectional, so mediation here is statistical, not causal; achievement could shape strengths (the authors mention gratitude) rather than the reverse. In Study 1 one teacher rated both behaviour and achievement at the same time, which may inflate their overlap, and intelligence was not measured in either study. The two studies used different behaviour and achievement measures, making differences between age groups hard to interpret, and the supplied paper text is missing the introduction and Study 1 method section.
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