Correlations of Student Personality Components with First-Year Student Success and Retention

Abstract

For the past three years, first year students in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Western Michigan University have been invited to participate in a survey focused on specific personality traits including Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Mindset, and Self-Direction. Students were invited to participate in both a start-of-semester survey and an end-ofsemester version during their first fall semester. Correlations of student responses on the startof-semester survey with first semester GPA, retention to second semester, and retention to second year have been reported elsewhere. The current paper investigates changes in student responses across the two surveys and correlations with student success and retention for the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 survey administrations. Results show that correlations between survey responses at the start of the first semester and the end of the first semester with retention to the second year are significantly different. Factors related to academic performance (e.g., high school and first-semester GPA) are more strongly correlated than start-of-semester survey responses. Personality trait correlations with retention were found to be much stronger when taken from the end-of-semester survey.