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Student Personality Types and Success in Online Courses

Updated on Jan 19, 2018

The Research, Evaluation, and Development (RED) team studied the correlation between student personality types and their performance in online Foundations classes.

Researcher: Allison Gallegos
Completed: Spring 2016

The RED team measured student personalities with a variation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which evaluates people based on four temperaments. Each temperament combines with the other three to create one personality type. The four temperament groups are as follows:

Extroversion vs. Introversion
Intuition vs. Sensing
Thinking vs. Feeling
Perceiving vs. Judging

Student performance measurements included the following variables:

Final grades
Time spent in class
Overall satisfaction with the class
Participation in discussion posts and replies
Overall rating of instructors

Key Findings

Feeling	Judging	Intuition	Thinking
More likely to read and reply to discussion board posts than "Thinking" and "Perceiving" More likely to give the overall course high ratings than "Sensing" and "Thinking" More likely to give the instructor high ratings than "Thinking"	More likely to read and reply to discussion board posts than "Thinking" and "Perceiving"	More likely to give the overall course high ratings than "Sensing" and "Thinking"	More likely to finish the course with higher grades than "Feeling"

Students from all temperaments spend similar amounts of time studying for the course.
Only one finding contradicted itself. In one course, "Sensing" students achieved higher final grades, while in another, "Intuition" students did.