The Relevance Of The Big Five Model To Students’ Adaptation To The Academic Environment Personality and Academic Experiences

The Big Five has been used as a theoretical framework for the evaluation of the 21stcentury skills and is associated with desirable outcomes. This study evaluates the extent to which the Big Five relates to students’ adaptation to the academic environment. Participants were 845 undergraduate students (60.7% female), aged from 17 to 31 years who answered the Factorial Personality Battery and the Academic Experience Questionnaire. Data reduction analysis at the facet level recovered the Big Five structure and indicated that Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness are, respectively, associated with higher personal, interpersonal, and study related academic adaptation dimensions. Agreeableness and Openness did not cluster with academic dimensions, suggesting lower relevance for academic adaptation in higher education. Key-words: university students; academic experiences; 21stcentury skills. A Relevância do Modelo dos Cinco Grandes Para a Adaptação dos Estudantes ao Ambiente Acadêmico

This study aims to map the way academic experiences relate to the Big Five Model.

The Big Five, Academic Adaptation and 21 st Century Skills
Becoming an undergraduate student constitutes a challengeable and exciting experience, which thousands of adolescents and young adults start every year. The way people experience the transition to higher education varies considerably and might produce a significant impact in their day-to-day activities and in significant aspects of life related to achievement, mental health, and happiness. Some findings, in the Brazilian context, highlight that some variables might explain individual differences related to how well undergraduate students adapt to the academic environment. For example, social abilities favor student's interaction (Soares, Poube, & Mello, 2009), high expectations regarding classmate's interaction, career project development and curricular activities engagement are positively related to academic adaptation (Soares, 2014). While, coping strategies focused on problem-solving and social practices development are associated with satisfactory processes of adaptation, strategies focused on emotion and religious thinking were negatively associated with adaptation (Carlotto, Teixeira, & Dias, 2015). Recent evidence suggests that the beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy) students present about their capacities to deal with college issues contribute to their life satisfaction (Santos, Zanon, & Ilha, 2019), and that their adaptation to higher education's challenges is related to the overall satisfaction with their experience in university (Santos, Polydoro, Scortegagna, & Linden, 2013 Castro, & Zoltowski, 2012). Therefore, characteristics related to personal and interpersonal dispositions, as well as dedication, persistence, and openness seem to be critical for the experience of Brazilian students' adaptation.
Research suggests that personality is, in fact, significantly related to academic performance (Poropat, 2009;Kappe & van der Flier, 2012) and adaptation in higher education (Credé & Niehorster, 2012), which are central indicators of students' success and promotors of persistence. Academic adaptation constitutes an important process for undergraduates' engagement, motivation, emotional well-being, and performance (Beyers & Goossens, 2002;Lounsbury, Tatum, Chambers, Owens, & Gibson, 1999;Wintre et al., 2011). In addition, twenty-first century skills, such as self-confidence, friendship development, cooperation, efficient study habits, self-identification with institutional values and facilities, and satisfaction related to a future career, which may be promoted by the undergraduate course, are critical for undergraduate adaptation (see Credé & Niehorster, 2012, for a through discussion about the topic). While these personal and interpersonal characteristics may be developed before enrolling in university, institutional and career self-identification may constitute more situational processes related to specific lived events during the academic period. If so, part of the academic adaptation process may be previously predicted by personality traits, while other components of adaptation are more contextually-driven.
Regarding the Big Five model (McCrae & John, 1992), Credé and Niehorster (2012) showed that more extraverted, agreeable, open, conscientious, and emotional stable students present better adaptation to the academic environment, because they are better in making friends, exploring the environment, are more confident, hardworking, and present less anxiety and stress. Despite these very plausible hypotheses, we have found few studies providing support for them (see, Rosin, Zanon, & Teixeira, 2014), indicating there is a need to further research regarding the associations between personality and adaptation.
Applied psychologists have been using multidimensional instruments to assess undergraduate academic experiences at university in specific areas (e.g., personal, interpersonal, study, career, and institutional) to investigate students' adaptation (Araújo et al., 2014;Araújo et al., 2016). The Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ: Baker &Siryk 1984), for example, is the most internationally used test. In addition, the Academic Experience Questionnaire (QVA: Almeida, Soares, & Ferreira, 2002;Granado, 2004;Granado, Santos, Almeida, Soares, & Guisande, 2005) has been used in Portugal and Brazil as an alternative and culturally-appropriate measure of students' experiences in college. Both questionnaires present similar content, but different structures (e.g., the SACQ does not include a dimension of career adaptation). In the Academic Experience Questionnaire, the personal dimension represents emotional maladjustment to the demands of the university environment in terms of feeling anxiety, stress, and confidence. The interpersonal dimension evaluates social adjustment to campus activities, and meeting and making friends. The study factor evaluates the adequacy of study habits, engagement, and academic efforts. The career dimension evaluates attachment and attitudes towards disciplines, the chosen course, and future job demands. Finally, the institutional area evaluates self--identification with values, staff, and facilities found in campus (Almeida et al., 2002). Thus, research relating the QVA with a Big Five instrument in Brazil might produce interesting findings for a national and international audience of personality and counseling psychologists.
This study aims to map the common academic adaptation dimensions into the Big Five structure without imposing any previously expected relations among the variables (e.g., through a principal component analysis). it uses a different data analysis methodology -principal components analysis -to explore the relations between students' personality and adaptation to higher education.

Participants and Procedure
Participants included 845 Brazilian undergraduate students (60.7% women), aged from 17 to 31 years (M = 21.3, SD

Pearson Correlations
Results in table 1 show that: a) more conscientious students present more favorable experiences in the study and career adaptation dimensions; b) more extraverted students present higher scores in interpersonal, study, and career adaptation dimensions; c) more emotionally stable students present higher scores in the personal, interpersonal, career, and institutional adaptation dimensions (because the scores in this dimension indicate emotional maladaptation, we inverted the scores), d) more agreeable students also present more favorable interpersonal adaptation experiences, and e) Openness only presents a small correlation with study adaptation, which was contrary to our expectations. The Big

5/10
Five inter-factor mean correlation is .18 and the mean correlation among the academic adaptation experience dimensions is .22, which indicates relative factor independence between both sets of constructs.  The best statistical and theoretical solution found (KMO = 0.85; and significant Bartlett's test -p< .001) indicated six factors with an eigenvalue above 1, that explained 53.3% of the total variance (table 2). PCA successfully identified the Big Five structure of personality.
Only two facets did not present the expected highest loadings on the correspondent factor (e.g., A3-Tender-

Discussion
In the current study, we evaluated the extent to which the Big Five model relates to undergraduates' adaptation to the academic environment. Our findings support theoretical expectations about the importance of personality for academic adaptation (Credé & Niehorster, 2012), except for Openness, which only presented a small correlation with the study adaptation dimension. Although previous studies have already asserted the importance of personality for academic success and emotional adjustment in college (Kappe &van der Flier, 2012;Poropat, 2009;Saklofske et al., 2009), our study is innovative in observing the relationship between personality structure and specific aspects of students' academic experiences that are relevant for academic adaptation.  and Big Five measures may provide further support for our findings in a broader international context. Selfdiscipline, communication, enthusiasm, and emotional stability, for example, constitute part of the 21 st century skills -a set of competences that predicts desirable outcomes through life (Kautz et al., 2014). Our findings constitute further evidence they are also associated with some areas of the academic adaptation.

Conclusion
The way university students experience their life in the academic environment might contribute (or not) for their adaptation -which might enhance engagement, indicate that adaptation to the academic context might be highly favored (or unfavored) by personality factors (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness).
These findings suggest intrinsic variables of personality play a relevant role in the way students deal with the many challenges associated to their transition to higher education, and therefore may be used in psychoeducational assessments and interventions as predictors of students transition and adaptation to higher education.