The effects of neuroticism on pair programming: An empirical study in the higher education context

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. © 2010 ACM.