The study seeks to determine the extent to which university students’
personality traits and their self-esteem can serve as the bases for predicting
their grade point average (GPA). The following groups of students from the
Faculty of Education in Ljubljana participated in the research: 88 students
attending the first year and 80 students attending the second year of the
Primary Teacher Education programme, and 41 students attending the
first year of the Social Pedagogy programme. The results showed that the
three groups differ in terms of the degree to which personality traits and
self-esteem account for individual differences in the GPA. A low level of
self-esteem (a moderate predictive power) proved to be a significant GPA
predictor with second year students of the Primary Teacher Education
programme, whereas the GPA of the first year students of the Social
Pedagogy programme was revealed to be highly predictable on the basis
of the entire set of five personality traits (a substantial predictive power),
with Conscientiousness and Energy as significant single predictors. The
results suggest that the predictive power of students’ personality traits
and self-esteem depends on the study programme and the academic
achievements included in the GPA.
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