Personality Pedagogy: Teaching the Big Five
(i.e., Ensuring that Conscientiousness does not become Consciousness; Helping Neuroticism not to morph into Narcissism)

Erik Noftle

Willamette University

Erik Noftle

One course I teach annually is personality psychology for undergraduates. One featured topic is the Big Five personality trait domains, which are usually pretty fun to teach. However, it has always pained me a bit to grade examsi and find the Big Five not only sometimes misconstrued but even occasionally misidentifiedii. This represents not only a problem for the unit on traits, but also for units on topics from relationships to culture, topics which also assume knowledge of the Big Five. Thus, for the purposes of my course, making sure that students understand the Big Five is rather important. Over time, I have accumulated several techniques for teaching this topic, some adopted years ago, some as recently as the current semester. I'll share four techniques that are not too time-intensive or laborious but together seem to have greatly improved students' understanding of these trait domains.

Familiarizing by Initially Administering a Big Five Measure. At the beginning of the semester students complete an assignment titled "Who Am I?". This assignment asks students to provide self-reports on measures assessing several different constructs representing different approaches to personality, including the Big Five. The assignment is constructed within excel, and administration, scoring, and providing instantaneous feedback occurs in different tabsiii. One goal of the assignment is to initially familiarize students with the constructs. However, it is useful for many purposes. We refer back to the assignment many times-I provide students with class averages and standard deviations for each construct as we get to it in the class, we use their experiences completing the measures to discuss fundamental issues such as reverse-scoring, trait dimensionality, self-report biases, the failings of the Myers-Briggs, etc.

Presenting Domain Labels as Flawed. In my experience, the central problem for students in learning the content of the Big Five is that linguistic labels are almost necessarily imprecise in defining what are unusually broad traits. Given that Cattell's inspired approach of fashioning new terms like parmia and premsia unfortunatelyv didn't really stick, we're left with labels from everyday language that are narrower than the domains they describe. Solutions that refer to traits via letters (e.g., Conscientiousness as "C"; John & Srivastava, 1999) or by numeral (Conscientiousness as III+; Goldberg, 1990) work pretty well for personality researchers but not for novices. So instead I present each trait providing a) sample items, b) a set of subcomponents for each (see section below), and c) the preliminary definitions articulated by John and Srivastava (1999, p. 121). Then I engage the class in a discussion of which of the five labels is the worst fit to the content therein. This accomplishes two things. First, it warns students to not overly trust the labels. Second, it further clarifies and reinforces content through discussion about why a label is not adequate.

Using Facets to Clarify Content. A more recent thing I've tried that has worked well has been to improve how I teach about subcomponents of the Big Five. In the past, I've taught the Costa and McCrae (1992) NEO-PI-R facets of the Five Factor Model but they have the downside of being a bit too numerous—students aren't likely to remember 30 facetsvi. When I saw Chris Soto's symposium about the BFI-2 at ARP 2015, I thought 3 facets per domain was a manageable number. Although the jury's still out on empirically identifying the subcomponents for the Big Five (although excellent attempts may be found: Roberts et al., 2004; Saucier & Ostendorf, 1999; Simms, 2010, Woo et al., 2014), the content clustered into the BFI-2 facets is also both easy to comprehend, reasonably maps out the domains, and offers facets which seem conceptually distinct. For example, learning about Extraversion as combining social engagement with assertiveness and energy level, makes it difficult to come away with the belief that the domain is only about being outgoing. Similarly, learning that Openness to Experience comprises intellectual curiosity, creative imagination, and aesthetic sensitivity renders a student unlikely to remember the domain as being about how open you are with other people.

Testing Knowledge within an Adjectival Big Five Measure. Finally, after discussing all of the above in class, I have prepared a brief in-class assignment to test student knowledge. The exercise uses an actual Big Five measure: Saucier's (2002) mini-markers of the Big Five, a short 40-item version of Goldberg's (1992) adjectival markers. Pairs of students are given the scale itself and are instructed to identify each adjective as within one of the Big Five domains and indicate whether it is an indicator of the high or the low end of the trait. In other words, students would correctly mark Bashful as E-, Bold as E+, Careless as C-, etc. Importantly, they are informed that there are 8 items for each of the Big Five domains, and how many of each are keyed positively and negatively. Student pairs compete for a small prizevii for the most correct matches and we discuss the results afterward. This activity not only tests knowledge but also serves to further correct prior mistaken assumptions.

I've found these four techniques to work wellviii. May you never have to face "consciousness" as part of the Big Five ever again!

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References

Cattell, R. B. (1947). Confirmation and clarification of primary personality factors. Psychometrika, 12, 197-220.

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216-1229.

Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4, 26-42.

John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102-138). New York: Guilford.

Roberts, B. W., Bogg, T., Walton, K., Chernyshenko, O., & Stark, S. (2004). A lexical approach to identifying the lower-order structure of conscientiousness. Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 164-178.

Saucier, G. (2002). Orthogonal markers for orthogonal factors: The case of the Big Five. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 1-31.

Saucier, G., & Ostendorf, F. (1999). Hierarchical subcomponents of the Big Five personality factors: A cross-language replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 613-627.

Simms, E. E. (2010). Assessment of the facets of the Five Factor Model: Further development and validation of a new personality measure. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, (10-B), pp. 6597. http://search.proquest.com/docview/30490150

Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2015, June). Conceptualization, development, and initial validation of the Big Five Inventory-2. Paper presented at the 2015 meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, St. Louis, MO.

Woo, S. E., Chernyshenko, O. S., Longley, A., Zhang, Z.-X., Chiu, C.-Y., & Stark, S. E., (2014). Openness to Experience: Its lower level structure, measurement, and cross-cultural equivalence. Journal of Personality Assessment, 96, 29-45.

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i It also pains me to grade exams [full stop]. Here I should cite inspiration in the footnote style of Sometimes I'm Wrong.

ii Admittedly, even seeing "Extroversion" bugs me.

iii Administering it online would also be a good approach but it wouldn't openly demonstrate to students how each scale is calculated via the scoring tab, which at least one student—and likely fewer than two students—has ever reported examining across all the different times I've taught the course.

iv This means that I have the somewhat awkward task of collecting their completed personality inventories in order to compute class-level scores. However, before distributing the assignment, I offer the students an escape clause—I tell them that if they wish they can complete the inventories about a close friend in college and that I will never know whether they have provided a self-report or informant-report. I assume that the vast majority of students complete the measures about themselves, but I could be wrong.

v Really, can't we go back to referring to Extraversion as "Surgency" à la Cattell (1947) and avoid the whole Jungian and MBTI associations? Anyone? Anyone?

vi It is my fondest desire to someday rectify this by teaching a course simply called "facets".

vii Mmmm... chocolate.

viii Results may vary; side effects in students may include fatigue, inquiries about "whether this will be on the test", irritability, dry mouth, and nausea, but hopefully not vomiting.