Integrating two separate research traditions: The Conscientiousness × Interest Compensation (CONIC) model

We describe the Conscientiousness × Interest Compensation (CONIC) model, which addresses two fundamental questions in motivation science and educational practice. First, why do some students invest maximal academic effort in certain subjects, whereas others fail to invest the necessary effort? The CONIC model urges researchers and practitioners to attend to both interest and conscientiousness, as these two constructs stem from research fields that have interacted very little over the last few decades, but both predict academic effort above and beyond each other. Second, how do interest and conscientiousness combine to explain academic effort? The CONIC model postulates that conscientiousness and interest uniquely predict academic effort but also (partly) compensate for each other in predicting academic effort. In this article, we first describe the theoretical underpinnings of the model and then summarize the empirical support it has garnered so far. In the second section, we situate the CONIC model in a larger picture of motivational constructs. In the third and fourth sections, we bring together our work on the CONIC model with other parts of our work: How do motivational and personality constructs change over time, and in what ways are they amenable to educational interventions? In the final section, we discuss the implications of the CONIC model with regard to everyday classroom teaching.