Are personality traits and learning styles correlates? Evidences from university students

Author(s) : Hina Akbar , Hafiza Gulnaz Fatima and Namirah Aslam

Abstract:

The purpose behind this correlational study was to establish the relationship between students’ learning styles and two of the personality traits i.e. conscientiousness and neuroticism. For this research, the population consisted of all the public university students from province of the Punjab. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 1,000 students from 10 universities of Punjab. ‘NEO-BFI’ developed by Costa & McCrae in 2010 (having 44-items for measuring personality traits) and LSI developed in 2005 by Kolb & Kolb (consisting of 10 factors for measuring learning styles) were used simultaneously to collect the required data. Both these instruments were standardized. Pearson correlation was applied for analyzing the data to find out the relationship between styles of learning and traits of personality. The study concluded that conscientiousness trait of personality was strongly correlated with the assimilating, accommodating and converging styles of learning and neuroticism trait of personality was strongly related with the diverging and accommodating styles of learning.

Keywords: personality traits, conscientiousness, neuroticism, learning styles, higher education