Personality traits as predictors of reading comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy

Abstract

Personality is an aspect of individual differences that contribute to one’s confidence and self-esteem, which can then impact on learning achievement such as reading ability as well as self-assessments of reading comprehension (i.e., metacomprehension). The present study investigated the role of individual differences on the Big Five personality in predicting reading comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy before and after a test. Personality traits were found to uniquely relate to reading comprehension, self-assessed confidence in comprehension, and metacomprehension accuracy. Openness to Experience positively correlated with all measures of confidence assessments on reading comprehension but failed to correlate to actual reading performance, indicating that participants were overconfident in their ability to perform. Extraversion negatively correlated with self-evaluation of comprehension performance and did not predict actual comprehension performance. More findings and educational implications from these findings were discussed to address the potential impacts of personality traits on reading and metacomprehension skills.