Student retention is the area of research concerned with determining the forces that shape student persistence in institutions of higher education. Mcguire, nd persistence is a measure of endurance by students from term to term or semester to semester. It is based on continued enrollment from the fall term to the spring term of an academic year. Early theories on retention were rooted in psychology, focusing on personal, individual characteristics.

Starting in the mid seventies the emphasis began to shift to a more sociological focus and more recently it has centered on the institutional context and its relationship to the students' integration. Unfortunately, too many studies tend to simply describe the differences between those students who leave and those who stay, while the best studies predict future behavior by explaining how these differences arise within the context of a specific institution. The notion that personality relates in meaningful ways to the kinds of careers people select and their performance and satisfaction in those careers has a long and significant history in vocational psychology. In psychology, the patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion are unique to an individual, and the ways they interact to help or hinder the adjustment of a person to other people and situations is central to behavioural study. In his psychoanalytic interpretation, sigmundâ freudâ asserted that the human mind could be divided into three significant components the id, the ego, and the superego which work together or come into conflict to shape personality.

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Our writers can help get your essay back on track, take a look at our services to learn more about how we can help. Essay writing service essay marking service place an order trait theories have arisen in recent years, with the object of determining aspects of personality that compel an individual to respond in a certain way to a given situation. Gordonâ allportâ delineated three kinds of traits with varying degrees of intensity: cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits. Raymondâ cattellâ used a group of obvious, surface personality traits to derive a small group of source traits, which he argued were central to personality. Objections to trait theories point out that behavior is largely situation dependent, and that such traits as honesty are not especially helpful in characterizing personality and behavior.

Despite such objections, trait theories have been popular models for quantifying personality. Paul costa has postulated five basic dimensions of personality introverson extroversion, friendly compliance hostile noncompliance, will, neuroticism, and openness to experience and has developed a test to measure these traits. Abrahamâ maslowâ and carlâ rogersâ supported a humanistic approach to personality, pointing out that other approaches do not factor in people's basic goodness and the motivational factors that push them toward higher levels of functioning. Researchers offering biological approaches to personality have focused on the action of specific genes andâ neurotransmittersâ as determinants. The two most popularly used personality measures are the myers briggs type indicator, used in the consultancy and training world, and the five factor revised neuroticism extroversion openness personality inventory, which is one of the most heavily used measures in the academic research area on personality. The myers briggs type indicator is an assessment of personality based on jung's theory of types. During the past decade, the test has received considerable attention and use in a variety of applied settings.

The mbti is a self report questionnaire designed to quantify non psychopathological personality types as postulated in jung's psychodynamic type theory myers amp mccaulley, 1985. Four dichotomous dimensions classify individuals either as extraverted e or introverted i , sensing s or intuitive n , thinking t or feeling f , and judging j or perceiving p. Each individual is classified in terms of one of 16 possible four letter codes such as esfj, enfp, intp, and isfj.

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Each type is said to define a specific set of behavioural tendencies, reflecting differences in attitudes, orientation, and decision making styles. For example, totally sane people and catatonic schizophrenics can have the exact same psychological type. The neo pi r in comparison to the mbti, is a five factor model of personality utilizing a hierarchical organization of personality traits in terms of five basic dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.

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Research using both natural language adjectives and theoretically based personality questionnaires supports the comprehensiveness of the model and its applicability across observers and cultures. A major distinction between the measures, is that the neo pi r assesses personality traits and the mbti assesses types. The neo pi r assumes that there are five universal qualities, so called traits, and that individuals vary in the degree to which they posses those traits. As a result the, neo pi r is focused on measuring individual's amount of each trait. Mbti on the other hand rather focuses on different qualitative categories, so called types, where individuals prefer one category over the other and where mbti classifies people in to one of these categories quenk, 20.

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Some observed similarities, are that both measures are limited to simply describing personality and not actually explaining it, which has been criticized from different sources carducci, 1998. Also both inventories have showed to be useful in many and quite diverse areas costa, 1996 de raad amp perugini, 2002 wurster, 1993. Further, existing results concerning the relationship between the big five neo pi r and academic achievement provide a wide range of coefficients. Some studies report correlations up to.40 for conscientiousness furnham, chamorro premuzic, amp mcdougall, 2002 and up to.42 for openness to experience gakhar, 1986 or even up to.78 for extraversion huq, rabman, amp mahmud, 1986 see table 1. These results suggest a remarkable impact of personality traits on academic achievement. Some authors report incremental validities of personality over and above academic ability tests such as the sat and recommend using personality assessment for college admissions e.g. Following these results, personality measures are promising predictors of academic outcome and should, therefore, be applied to university student admission.