Educational applications of personality research

Personality plays a pivotal role in students’ experience of school, playing out its role in the relationships individuals share with peers and teachers, influencing classroom behavior, and contributing to academic achievement. Three educational applications of personality research may be distinguished (Braden, 1995). The first is studying the impact of normal variation in personality on outcomes such as motivation, social orientation, and learning. The second application is the study of abnormality and exceptionality.
Educators need diagnostic tools for identifying individuals requiring special treatment because of  dysfunctional personality, and also for recognition of the unusually gifted. The third application is facilitating educators’ management of personality variation. Examples include implementing treatment programs for disturbed children, tailoring instruction methods to the individual, and training social-emotional skills (Greenberg et al., 2003).
These applications draw upon many different approaches to the study and implementation of personality
models in the classroom. In this chapter, we focus primarily on the dimensional approach to personality, which describes multiple continuous traits, as opposed to typological descriptive schemes or idiographic case studies. The latter approaches are, of course, essential in understanding the individual, especially in the clinical context; to do them justice though would seemingly require an entire volume. There are three types of psychological construct that play a pivotal role in the educational setting:
 (a) dispositional constructs, including personality traits and related stable personal qualities,
(b) mediating processes that are influenced by traits and transmit their behavioral and experiential effects (e.g., coping with stress), and
(c) educational outcomes such as promoting well-being, addressing problem behaviors,
and improving academic achievement