User-Friendly Automated Evaluation Tool for Assessment of Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

Educational institutions have a considerable interest in identifying links between personality traits and academic success. It has long been known that intelligence quotient (I.Q.) alone is not the sole, or a particularly good, predictor of success. Learning rarely occurs in isolation, and so our ability to accurately perceive how others feel or react may also be an indicator, or at least a contributor, to educational success. The capacity to receive emotions, simulate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them is one definition of what has been termed Emotional Intelligence (E.I.). The innovative E.I. evaluation method developed in this study is based on an interdisciplinary approach between the computer science, engineering and humanities departments. An interdisciplinary approach is needed because the authors’ goal in developing the evaluation tool is to address the problem of designing an effective yet simple and user-friendly method that educators of any background could find easy and beneficial to use. The literature on E.I. provides very few examples of effective systematic interventions where it was pointed out that, after many years of research, there are still very few examples of successful interventions that specifically increase E.I and that while self-contained seminars may raise the awareness of E.I, they are unlikely to affect permanent change.