Abstract
D.Phil.
In the Republic of South Africa, higher education institutions today are challenged with the need to address a number of pressing demands. In a new democratic dispensation and following the imperatives set out in the National Plan for Higher Education in South Africa (2001), universities have widened participation to students from all population groups. With the ultimate goal of successful throughput, equal opportunity and access must be provided to all prospective students. However, already in 1996 it was acknowledged that equity of access needs to be combined with equity of success. The White paper (1997, clause 1.18) underlines that the principle of equity requires “fair opportunities both to enter higher education programmes and to succeed in them.”
Though equity of access, and hence a more representative student body has been greatly achieved, present statistics and national research findings still confirm ignificant challenges in the retention and successful throughput of students. These results suggest that challenges in this regard remain unresolved. A less contradictory relationship between access to university education and academic success at university level needs to be cultivated. More effective admission and selection decisions, together with the identification of accurate predictors of academic success, can make a positive contribution in solving this dilemma.
In the past, selection and placement decisions for studying at a university were made primarily on the basis of performance-related criteria and other cognitive variables. In this study the researcher wanted to determine whether the non-cognitive factor of personality, more particularly as it is represented in the Big Five model of personality (Digman,1990; McCrae & Costa,1987; Goldberg,1990), can be used as predictor of academic achievement (and consequently as a proposed instrument of selection and placement) in a multicultural South African context.
The Big Five model of personality represents a hierarchical organisation of personality traits in terms of five basic dimensions called Extraversion, Neuroticism, conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Agreeableness (McCrae & John, 1992). Although the predictive validity of the Big Five factors in academic achievement has often been researched internationally, less research in this area has been completed in South Africa. Recent work in South Africa showed that measurement equivalence across population groups can be established for South African samples; less work had been done on the equivalence across population groups of the predictive validity of the Big Five factors with reference to academic performance.
The overarching aim of the present study was therefore to investigate the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and the academic achievement of first-year B Com university students in South Africa, as well as to examine whether these relationships are equivalent for African and white students. In order to achieve this goal the incremental predictive validity of the Big Five personality factors, compared to cognitive ability, in the academic achievement of students was explored. In addition, the predictive value of Population group above and beyond that of intelligence and personality traits was researched. The possible interaction between the Big Five personality factors and Population group was explored in the final step.