Who Are Our Students? Understanding Students' Personality for Refined and Targeted Physical Education. A Scoping Review.

Students’ personality is an essential component in order to plan and teach physical
education (PE) lessons according to students’ individual needs. Additionally, personality
formation in general is part of the educational mandate and student personality
development specifically is considered as an elementary goal of PE. Although student
personality is a central topic in the PE context, the state of research, especially regarding
the underlying personality understandings, is diverse and hard to capture. Therefore,
this scoping review aims to (I) describe the underlying personality understandings and
(II) analyze research questions and results of studies examining students’ personality
in PE. We conducted a scoping review. Eleven databases were chosen because of
their specification within the field of education, sports and health sciences. We included
references if they empirically examined students’ personality in PE and were published
in German or English. Twenty-four studies were included in the review. Fifteen of the
included studies were cross-sectional, nine longitudinal. Regarding aim I), the underlying
personality understandings were inconsistent across the studies but most of the studies
followed trait theory. Considering aim II), the included studies investigated relationships
between students’ personality and either (a) students’ achievement in PE, (b) students’
psychological determinants of PE participation (e.g., motivation, anxiety), or (c) a school
sports intervention. Results indicated that e.g., extraverted students tend to enjoy PE
more and obtain less anxiety in PE. The review showed that students’ personality in PE
is empirically examined but the studies’ underlying personality understandings, research
questions and results are diverse. Findings highlight that PE contributes to students’
personality development. Additionally, the review showed that results of personality
research in PE context can be used in order to teach PE in a student-centered way
(e.g., by deducing the detected relationships considering extraversion) and by this
support students’ lifelong physical activity. Further and targeted research in this field
can help PE teachers to tailor their teaching to their students’ needs. This increases the
chances to achieve PE’s two main goals—“educating to sports (e.g., personality-aligned
lessons addressing different motives)” and “educating through sports (e.g., personality
development)” in the long term.