It's hilarious how the educational establishment tries to take well-known concepts with a rich psychological and psychometric history behind them, rebrand them,

It's hilarious how the educational establishment tries to take well-known concepts with a rich psychological and psychometric history behind them, rebrand them, decide they're the Most Important Thing Ever for three years or so, and then toss them for the next thing. They usually pretend along the way that the same people haven't been in charge of the educational establishment for 60 years or so, and that the present state of education is some sort of test-driven Korean drill-and-kill dystopia, to which the latest fad is a breath of fresh air. "Conscientiousness" is the term of art. It's part of the Big 5 personality model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ) which has its own various promoters and refuters. Inasmuch as the literature is contradictory it's because it's not a model that works super well for actually doing stuff, beyond marginal effects (more conscientious worker == better, all else equal) & tautologies (hard workers work hard and do better at hard jobs that reward hard work).