A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Teacher Personality on Teacher Effectiveness and Burnout

Abstract

The question of what makes a good teacher has been asked by practitioners, policymakers, and researchers for decades. However, there is no guiding framework about which qualities are important for teachers. Thus, it is necessary to examine these qualities using a recognized framework and to summarize the previous literature on this topic. We conducted a meta-analysis on the 25 studies (total N = 6294) reporting the relationships between teacher Big Five personality domains (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) and two teacher job-related outcomes (i.e., teacher effectiveness and burnout). Furthermore, the influence of three moderators was assessed, namely, the type of teacher effectiveness measure (i.e., evaluations of teaching, student performance self-efficacy, classroom observation, and academic achievement), source of personality report (i.e., self-report vs other-report), and the instructed educational level (i.e., elementary, secondary, and tertiary). Overall, teacher Big Five domains (except for agreeableness) were positively associated with teacher effectiveness, especially for evaluations of teaching. Furthermore, teacher emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness were negatively associated with burnout. Other-reports of teacher personality were more strongly associated with outcomes than self-reports. There were no differences in the strength of the associations between the educational levels. The need for using common descriptors in teacher research as well as practical implications of the findings for teacher personality measurement is discussed.

Effects of Levels of Self-Regulation and Regulatory Teaching on Strategies for Coping With Academic Stress in Undergraduate Students

“…From a complementary viewpoint, teacher effectiveness at university has been measured in terms of students' well-being and good teacher-student relations (Lekwa et al, 2018;Aldrupa et al, 2019). Evidence has also shown the influence of teachers' personality characteristics in effective teaching (Kim et al, 2019).…”

Using video- and text-based situational judgement tests for teacher selection: a quasi-experiment exploring the relations between test format, subgroup differences, and applicant reactions

“…Teachers' non-cognitive attributes cover a range of constructs tapping into, for example, teachers' motivation and personality. Whereas cognitive abilities (as measured by e.g., college entrance exam tests) seem to be rather weak predictors of teacher effectiveness (e.g., Aloe & Becker, 2009; , a number of non-cognitive attributes have been found to be significantly related to teacher effectiveness (e.g., Klassen & Tze, 2014;Klassen et al, 2018;Kim et al, 2019;Kunter et al, 2013), underscoring the necessity to include appropriate measures of non-cognitive attributes in teacher selection processes. Nonetheless, researchers and practitioners have struggled with the assessment of non-cognitive (teacher) attributes as they are difficult to measure and, when using classical self-reports, are prone to response biases and faking (e.g., Johnson & Saboe, 2011;.…”

The selection gap in teacher education: Adverse effects of ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic status on situational judgment test performance

“…These three domains were identified through an extensive literature review and discussions with ITE staff regarding critical characteristics of effective teachers . The decision to include the personality trait conscientiousness was based on empirical evidence indicating that teachers scoring higher on conscientiousness tend to perform better in the classroom (e.g., Baier, Decker, Voss, Kleickmann, Klusmann, & Kunter, 2018;Kim et al, 2019). Mindset was chosen as one of the target attributes because teachers' beliefs about the nature of learning and the plasticity of student abilities can have pervasive consequences for their instructional choices as well as students' performance and self-beliefs (e.g., Roose, Vantieghem, Vanderlinde, & Van Avermaet, 2019;Timmerman, Kuyper, & van der Werf, 2015;Zhu, Urhahne, & Rubie-Davies, 2018).…”