engleski

“Likes to read?”: Assigning pre-service teachers' reading-related behaviour to personality and creativity

What kind of structural psychological information is given by a person's behavioural preference for reading? In order to answer this question, we used self-assessment of students on the selected list of reading and writing-related (RW) behaviour from the IPIP item base (i.e., items including word parts: read-, word-, vocab-, book-, speak-, speech-, learn-, and writ-), Croatian translation of the 300 IPIP NEO PI facets, and the Linguistic Creativity Scale (LCS-15). The study participants were 98 students of university teacher studies (age range: 20–27 years). The results indicate: a) the types of texts that the students read, b) to what extent they as future teachers take part in the creation of stylistically different texts and how they make sense of reading and its outcomes among students, and most importantly, c) within what personality structures are RW behaviours embedded. The analyses point to close relationships of all reading and writing-related behaviours to the personality traits listed within the Big-five trait taxonomy. In specific, the analyses show that these 103 RW items formed two broad orthogonal factors (F1. Likes to read, F2. Reads to learn) which both correlated with Openness (r(98) = .26, p = .009, and r(98) = .41, p < .001) as Openness reflects the capacity for imagination and artistic and intellectual curiosity. Factor 2 (Reads to learn) correlated most strongly with the facet of Openness entitled Intellect (r(98) = .60, p < .001). In conclusion, the findings of this study are interpreted following contemporary educational perspectives on reading and literacy competence acquisition as one of the key competencies for lifelong learning, teacher pre‐service and in‐service education, and the influence teachers exert on their students' reading, learning and its outcomes. Most importantly for psychological science, this study highlights reading and writing behaviour assessment as informative of personality structure and creativity.

personality assessment, Big-five, literacy competence, reading, teaching

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