Why emotional intelligence should be taught in school

How do you get ahead at school? Well, most researchers will point confidently to two key qualities. One is intelligence. Being able to understand the concepts of what is being taught is a pretty good way of measuring how successful a student will be.

The second skill is conscientiousness, or being organised with your time and thoughts. However, new research has come out to say that these two factors only explain 15 and 5 percent of the differences between children's achievement respectively. So what else is going on? Emotional intelligence.

Learn about yourself to get ahead 🧑‍🏫

A new research paper over on Psychology Today found that emotionally intelligent children get better exam results and better grades. In the research paper, they found that broadly speaking, emotional intelligence improved student performance by 4 percent. But, the authors argue, different types of emotional intelligence scored better than others.

Students who demonstrated high ability in emotional management - or learning to regulate their own moods - showed a 7 percent difference in achievement. Understanding the emotions of others accounted for 12 percent. What's going on?

Emotional success 🙌

The paper cites three key areas:

• Helping yourself: Emotional intelligence gives students the tools to help understand how they're feeling. Whether it's being nervous about an exam, or failing in a task, being able to regulat these emotions was found to be an important part of student success.
• Maintain relationships with students, teachers, and family: building and maintaining a strong support network allows students to ask for help and guidance when they need it, and create a more consistent experience for them to learn in.
• Emotional awareness improves learning: this is the most fascinating aspect of the study. When students could attach an emotional response to a piece of learning, their ability to retain that information grew significantly. Students who didn't struggled to retain information.

So if you want a student to get ahead, help them understand themselves first, before they try to understand the world around them.