Personality and Teaching: An Investigation into Finnish Teachers’ Personality, Temperament and Motivational Orientations

Teacher judgements about their students’ achievement play an important role in everyday school context. Previous studies have shown that teachers favor in their judgments students with similar personalities. The students' personalities influence their teacher's global judgment of students' academic abilities. In general, students whose personalities are more similar to their teacher's are rated more highly when compared to their peers. Moreover, several studies show that the degree of personality similarity between two persons is rather connected with attraction or sympathy, which leads to a more positive estimation of a person. Thus, the central aim of our research project is to investigate teachers’ personality traits, temperament types and motivational orientations in Finland.