Perseverance and Conscientiousness Scales as Indicators of Students’ School Success

When thinking about students’ achievement, the first thing associated with it is future success. When trying to explain why all things being equal some students may achieve highly and others may not, researchers have identified a variety of influencing factors, both those that can be measured by the tests of cognitive abilities and intelligence, and those that represent student’s personality and temperament. While cognitive achievement is usually closely related to intelligence, personality and temperament are not. Researchers are still searching for the best factors to explain the impact of personality on student’s achievement in learning and in everyday life and work. One such factor is perseverance that is measured in Grit scale; according to research, students with higher perseverance show better academic performance and achieve higher results in later career. Similarly, student’s personality in various personality tests have shown a high correlation between achievement and personality trait Conscientiousness. The aim of this study is to adapt an instrument for measuring perseverance, to create an instrument for measuring conscientiousness in the Latvian language, and to test whether these instruments can be used in adolescent population. The study involved 219 sixth and ninth grade students from 15 schools in Latvia. The factor structure of these two concepts were created and approved using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The factor analysis resulted in two scales – one for each concept, which were compared with the students’ self-reported diligence, working hard and academic achievement at current school year. Results showed that students’ conscientiousness is closely related to perseverance and academic achievement. Overall, students’ self-reported academic achievement can be explained by perseverance (R² = 0.48) and conscientiousness (R² = 0.59). Both constructs explain 62% of student self-reported academic achievement.