Objective: In the present research, we examined the effect of getting a new teacher on consistency in students' personality measures, including trait and social cognitive constructs.
Method: To test the effect of this kind of situational transition, we analyzed two large longitudinal samples (N = 5,628; N = 2,458) with quasi-experimental study designs. We used two consistency measures (i.e., rank-order clations and changes in variance over time) to compare students who got a new teacher with students who kept the same teacher.
Results: Multiple-group latent variable analyses showed no differences in the rank-order correlations for the math-related social cognitive constructs of interest, effort, self-concept, self-regulation, anxiety, and the Big Five personality traits. Significantly lower rank-order correlations were found for some of the German- and English-related social cognitive constructs (i.e., effort measures) for the group of students who got a new teacher. Regarding the changes in variance (over time), we found no systematic differences between groups in both studies.
Conclusions: We found partial support for the idea that social cognitive variables are more susceptible to environmental changes (i.e., getting a new teacher) than the Big Five personality traits are.
Keywords: Big Five; consistency; new teacher; social cognitive constructs.
© 2018 The Authors. Journal of Personality Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.