This paper reports on an empirical study that investigates the effects of the personality trait of neuroticism on the academic performance of students who practiced pair programming during one academic semester. The experiment was conducted at The University of Auckland involving 270 first year undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory programming course. In this study, we hypothesized that neuroticism or lack of 'emotional stability' potentially affects pair students' academic performance. However, from the analysis of our results we found lack of evidence to support this. A correlation analysis showed significant positive associations between the conscientiousness personality trait and almost all performance criteria, thus corroborating evidence reported in the educational psychology literature.

This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the Personality factor conscientiousness on the effectiveness of Pair Programming as a pedagogical tool in higher Education. This experiment took place at the University of Auckland, using as subjects undergraduate students attending an introductory programming course. Conscientiousness was chosen because it has been shown to be the most consistent predictor of academic achievement. Our findings showed that differences in conscientiousness level did not significantly affect the academic performance of students who pair programmed, which could have been due to the short duration of the tasks used throughout the experiment. However, results revealed that another Personality factor - Openness to experience - presented a significant correlation with paired students' academic performance.

Pair Programming (PP) has been long researched in industry and academia. Although research evidence about its usefulness is somewhat inconclusive, previous studies showed that its use in an academic environment can benefit students in programming and design courses. In our study, we investigated the ldquohumanrdquo aspect of PP; in particular the effects that personality attributes may have on PP's effectiveness as a pedagogical tool. We conducted a formal experiment at the University of Auckland to investigate the influence of personality differences among paired students using the five-factor model as a personality measurement framework. The aim of our study was to improve the implementation of PP as a pedagogical tool through understanding the impact the variation in the personality profile of paired students has towards their academic performance. Our findings showed that differences in personality traits did not significantly affect the academic performance of students who pair programmed.