Personality and learning styles are both likely to play significant roles in influencing academic

achievement. Students differ in how they process, encode, recall, organize, and apply the information they
learn; some are thoughtful learners while others process information more superficially.

In the article, relationship between personality traits, learning styles, and academic achievement among
college students is investigated on the basis of how these learning strategies mediate the link between
personality traits and academic achievement.
Results show that our personality results have several significant implications for students and instructors.
Two of the Big Five traits, conscientiousness and agreeableness, were positively related with all four
learning styles (synthesis analysis, methodical study, fact retention, and elaborative processing).
Conscientiousness appears to be a useful trait for attaining high levels of academic achievement. Students
who are careless and do not study systematically are more likely to see their performance suffer. We also
found that besides being conscientious both agreeableness and openness also benefits students for being
cooperative and intellectually curious. Overall, this suggests that students who are organized, disciplined,
determined, and intellectually curious are more likely to use all four learning styles in maximizing their
learning.
Instructors who are aware of the importance of these personality traits could design course assignments
and testing methods that promotes conscientiousness (e.g., requiring drafts of assignments to be submitted
in small parts), agreeableness (e.g., supporting and rewarding cooperative behaviors), and openness (e.g.
capturing students’ imaginations by linking concepts to current events). Therefore, personality trait theory
is considered significant in terms of understanding individual academic differences that can help the
instructor to facilitate the academic success of their students by modifying the task and evaluation criteria.