Of the Big Five personality traits, only conscientiousness (r = .22) and openness (r = .13) correlate appreciably with mathematics achievement¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r3 · q3 · i2 medium · n=30 meta-analyses, 66 correlations from 13,853 effect sizes (~4.66 million participants)
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Conscientiousness correlates r = .22 with mathematics achievement and openness .13; agreeableness (.01), extraversion (−.02) and neuroticism (−.09) are negligible (Meyer et al. 2023, about 85–100 effect sizes each, children and adolescents). These are correlations compiled across meta-analyses: they describe how strongly the characteristic goes with mathematics achievement, not what causes it.

Subclaims¶

q3 i2 Conscientiousness correlates r = .22 with mathematics achievement and openness .13; agreeableness (.01), extraversion (−.02) and neuroticism (−.09) are negligible (Meyer et al. 2023, about 85–100 effect sizes each, children and adolescents). → Breit et al. 2025

Evidence¶

Breit et al. 2025¶

Breit, M., Schneider, M., & Preckel, F. (2025). Mathematics achievement and learner characteristics: A systematic review of meta-analyses. Learning and Individual Differences, 118, 102621. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2024.102621

q3 · systematic review of meta-analyses · i2 · medium effect, r = −.09 to .22 · n=30 meta-analyses, 66 correlations from 13,853 effect sizes (~4.66 million participants) · review · r3

The review compiles zero-order correlations from published meta-analyses (each with at least ten effect sizes, the largest one kept where several covered a variable), found by a systematic PsycINFO search in July 2024. It pools nothing further and controls for nothing: many of these characteristics correlate with one another, so a correlation here says how strongly the characteristic goes with mathematics achievement, not that it causes it. All five estimates come from Meyer et al. (2023), each over roughly 206,000–237,000 children and adolescents and corrected for unreliability: conscientiousness .22, openness .13, agreeableness .01, extraversion −.02, neuroticism −.09.

Discussion¶

The authors place this alongside earlier cross-domain findings of a modest link between achievement and conscientiousness and openness (Poropat 2009), and cite conscientiousness facets such as industriousness and task planning as most relevant.

Learner Variables¶

• Personality Traits — predictor: learners who differ on it differ in outcomes

Related Claims¶

• Mathematics achievement correlates more strongly with learners' knowledge, skills and cognitive abilities than with their personality traits, goals or emotions
• Emotion regulation variables predict academic outcomes (GPA and academic honors) beyond Big Five personality traits and gender in high school students — related
• Teacher extraversion, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness are each positively associated with teacher effectiveness, while agreeableness is not a significant correlate — related
• Teacher Big Five domains show their largest associations with burnout for emotional stability and conscientiousness, but none of the burnout effects are statistically significant — related
• Other-reports of teacher personality are more strongly associated with teacher outcomes than self-reports — related
• Big Five personality factors show few consistent effects on metacognitive judgments in domain-specific tests — related
• Mathematics self-concept correlates strongly with mathematics achievement (r = .43), while verbal self-concept barely does (r = .12) — related
• Conscientiousness correlates more strongly with grades than with standardized test scores, across both language and STEM domains — related
• Conscientiousness shows the strongest links to SRL and robustly predicts academic performance even after accounting for cognitive ability — related
• Extraversion correlates positively with achievement in language domains but not in STEM, a domain pattern driven by grades — related
• Funnel plot asymmetry for openness, extraversion, and neuroticism appears attributable to reasons other than publication bias — related
• Neuroticism correlates negatively with achievement overall, most strongly with STEM test scores — related
• Conscientiousness is robustly associated with academic performance across primary, secondary, and tertiary education, with openness the next strongest predictor — a broader claim this one bears on
• Most extracted associations are small: 219 of nearly 500 coefficients fall below a medium effect size, with conscientiousness–academic adjustment (.64) the largest — related
• Conscientiousness is a reliable meta-analytic predictor of academic achievement — a broader claim this one bears on
• Student-reported teacher neuroticism negatively predicts student performance self-efficacy, with effects that differ across mathematics and English — related