314 III. DEvELOPMENT
ondary/tertiary education. Observer-  rated 
conscientiousness (.50) not only predicted 
academic achievement strongly during pri -
mary school but also observer-  rated open -
ness (.43); in secondary/tertiary education, 
validities were lower though still substantial, 
with values of .38 for conscientiousness and 
.28 for openness to experience. Therefore, 
observer ratings also show validity to pre -
dict academic performance, though whether 
they predict beyond self-  ratings remains a 
subject for further investigation.
During the previous decade, there has 
been growing attention for personality traits 
as building blocks for social–  emotional com -
petencies or skills (also called 21st-  century 
skills) in students (John & De Fruyt, 2015; 
Kankaras, 2017). Primi, Santos, John, and 
De Fruyt (2016) analyzed the items of a se -
ries of measures that were frequently used 
to assess social–  emotional skills in elemen -
tary or secondary school students and dem -
onstrated that their content could be classi -
fied according to the broad dimensions of 
the FFM. Abrahams et al. (2019) discussed 
how the FFM facilitated the construction 
of social–  emotional skills frameworks and 
brought useful knowledge from the field of 
developmental personality psychology to 
education to enhance our understanding of 
the development of social–  emotional skills. 
Chernyschenko, Kankaras, and Drasgow 
(2018) and Abrahams et al. (2019) recently 
proposed more elaborate frameworks, build -
ing on the FFM, distinguishing a more-fine- 
grained set of skills. In these models, per -
sonality traits function as social–  emotional 
resources that directly affect students’ per -
formance at school (Durlak, Weissberg, 
Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Tay -
lor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017), 
but are also considered as important out -
comes of education themselves that students 
need to develop.
New Directions
We have stressed in this review that the field 
of personality research in adolescence has 
made rapid progress during the past decade 
and has attracted considerable attention 
from multiple applied fields such as clinical 
psychology, forensic practice, and educa -tion. The field is now moving toward a more 
dynamic approach to personality, consid -
ering not only stable elements but also the 
propensity of traits to change (Specht et al., 
2014). This switch marks the start of inno -
vative research to examine how personality 
matures and is affected, in conjunction with 
how traits affect consequential outcomes. 
Especially the notion of malleability of traits 
has attracted the interest of a broad group 
of researchers and practitioners, with ado -
lescence and young adulthood identified as 
sensitive periods of change.
Today we know the importance of per -
sonality constructs for understanding how 
students achieve at school (Borghans, Duck -
worth, Heckman, & ter Weel, 2008; Cunha, 
Heckman, & Schennach, 2010; Heckman, 
Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006), how young adults 
approach the labor market (De Fruyt & Mer -
vielde, 1999), how people navigate and built 
their careers and are affected, in turn, by 
those experiences (Wille & De Fruyt, 2014; 
Wille, Hofmans, Feys, & De Fruyt, 2014; 
Woods, Lievens, De Fruyt, & Wille, 2013), 
how people become happy in their personal 
lives, and how traits contribute to explain -
ing mental disorders (Laceulle, Ormel, Vol -
lebergh, van Aken, & Nederhof, 2014). It is 
likely that this more dynamic view of youth– 
personality will continue to benefit further 
from research innovations and methodolo -
gies increasingly used in adult personality 
research. Two clear and promising advances 
are already well-  established in studies of 
adults: (1) the renewed interest in person– 
situation interactions and (2) the study of 
within-  person variability over time. Howev -
er, these two advances still need to be trans -
ferred to the study of personality differences 
in adolescence.
First, the study of the development of 
personality in the past suffered from the 
lack of an agreed-  upon taxonomy of situ -
ations  to examine trait–  environment inter -
actions. So far, researchers have mainly ex -
amined the impact of more easy-to-get and 
demographic-  type characteristics of person -
ality, such as growing up in a single-  parent 
family and being first or last in sibling birth 
order (Jefferson, Herbst, & McCrae, 1998). 
In addition, researchers have also investi -
gated the impact of behaviors of significant 
others on personality development, such as 