Personality Development

Personal identities develop in a variety of ways over the course of a person’s lifetime.  Because the events that occur over a lifetime and genetics are individual to each person, every person’s personality will be unique.  Personality describes the long-lasting personal characteristics of a person. While events can cause personality to shift, a person's temperament is more stable. One's temperament is the foundation for their personality (Caspi & Shiner, 2006). While there are a near infinite number of terms one can use in the description of somebody’s personality, research psychologists have found what they call the “Big Five Factors of Personality.”  These factors include openness (example: independence and imagination), conscientiousness (ex: organization and discipline), extraversion (ex: sociability and affection), agreeableness (ex: trustworthiness and helpfulness), and neuroticism (ex: emotional stability and security).  Each of these “supertraits” not only possess itself, but also a variety of other characteristics similar to it to help describe the person’s identity.  These traits are also not only descriptions of positive aspects of the trait, but also are used to identify people who are on the negative extreme or anywhere in the middle.  In fact, most people do not lie on the extreme ends of any of these factor ranges, but rather somewhere in the middle of the spectre.  The big five is used because it can not only track development of personality through life, but has also been used with good results in a wide variety of cultures.

One way to develop a more socially acceptable personality is to know where one falls short and seek where improvements can be found.  For this reason, it would benefit my students to take a personality test similar to the one used by the big five factors so that students can see where on the spectrums their personalities fall.  I can then compile all of this data into an anonymous spreadsheet and allow my students to make different types of graphs using the information to review how to construct different types of graphs.  I would ask them to make a bar graph, histogram, box-and-whisker graph, stem-and-leaf plot, and pie chart to display the information and then have them explain which type of graph best represents the data (2.4).  The students will also be asked to identify certain pieces of information about the graph such as mean, median, mode, minimum, maximum, and the quartile ranges.  Later in the year I would have students again take the test and present the data using their preferred representation.  The class would then compare the changes in the graphs and analyze whether the changes in personality were positive of negative for which traits.  Seeing my students personality early in the year will also help me know the diversity of students in the class.  It has also been shown that students higher in conscientiousness oftentimes earn a higher grade point average (Noftle & Robins, 2007).  While the students will be learning about data representations and terminology, I will be learning about the students in my class through this project.