Using individual interest and conscientiousness to predict academic effort: Additive, synergistic, or compensatory effects?

Although both conscientiousness and domain-specific interest are believed to be major determinants of academic effort, they have rarely been brought together in empirical studies. In the present research, it was hypothesized that both interest and conscientiousness uniquely predict academic effort and statistically interact with each other to predict academic effort. In 4 studies with 2,557, 415, 1,025, and 1,531 students, respectively, conscientiousness and interest meaningfully and uniquely predicted academic effort. In addition, conscientiousness interacted with interest in a compensatory pattern, indicating that conscientiousness is especially important when a student finds a school subject uninteresting and that domain-specific interest plays a particularly important role for students low in conscientiousness.