Psychology or Sociology - Fun Activity - "The Big 5" Personality Dimensions

Personality Questionnaire and Lesson Package based on "The Big 5" Personality Dimensions.
This is a great way for students to learn about personality, themselves and others! It is a very self-explanatory, self-contained package containing a variety of self-directed activities that require very little preparation or active instruction on the part of the teacher. It can fill two to three days of instructional time, or perhaps more if you choose to use all of the activities and discuss all responses as a class for closure.
The “Big Five” model is a popular contemporary approach to analyzing personality which sometimes gets left out of psychology textbooks. It’s very accessible and relate-able for students, because it uses familiar terms that can be easily explained without the use of a lot of alienating psychological jargon.
Students first take a simple, straightforward 5-page questionnaire that provides them with a score for their personality in each of the five main dimensions of personality traits—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. Then they learn to identify the dimensions themselves, matching them with their definitions and reading detailed descriptions about the traits within each dimension, also learning about their own strengths and weaknesses as self-reported on the questionnaire sheets. Then they read a short article giving the background and other interesting aspects of the Big 5 model, before beginning the written assignments.
The package contains five different activities: a simple starter worksheet for basic understanding, requiring students to identify the five personality dimensions by comparing the questionnaire items with brief definitions for each one; a worksheet of reading comprehension questions for the article; an assignment of short personal responses requiring self-reflection; a worksheet of open-ended questions designed for small-group discussion, requiring critical analysis of human personality and application to real-life experience; and a worksheet designed to guide students through a fun interaction with classmates who have similar scores on the various dimensions. Also included is the Teacher's Guide sheet to provide some tips and pointers, helping you get the best results from the activities.