Infusing Emotional Intelligence into FYE Courses at Peace College
The following article has been submitted by Korrel Kanoy, Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology at Peace College. In it she details how her campus has had great success applying Emotional Intelligence with their first year students, and she provides advice for other campuses who are considering incorporating emotional and social topics into their first year curriculum.
Peace College, a private, liberal arts college for women, began infusing emotional intelligence (EI) concepts into our First Year Experience (FYE) class during the fall 2008 semester. Our class is designed to help students make a successful transition to college and what better way to do that than to equip students with EI knowledge and skills? We found it easy to infuse EI concepts throughout our FYE curriculum and would expect most colleges to have the same experience.
Consideration of the value of a liberal arts education becomes meaningful to 18 year olds when contextualized in terms of their goals and ambitions (self actualization) or even the level of understanding related to why they came to college (self awareness). A discussion of study skills becomes even more relevant if impulse control (study first, party later) also becomes a meaningful part of the conversation. Discussions about roommate issues and changing relationships with family members become more meaningful when independence, empathy and interpersonal relationship constructs are added to the discussion. The list goes on.
In fact, we found it so easy to incorporate EI into our FYE curriculum that it became difficult to know where to stop. By the end of the semester, my students were drawing connections to EI even when I wasn’t doing so. When we were covering identity development related to career choice, A particularly astute student commented that it would be hard to develop a meaningful career identity without first having well developed self awareness and a certain level of independence from parents who might try to influence choices.
To initiate this program, we trained 21 faculty and staff members to interpret the EQ-i® and each first-year student met with a trained interpreter for 30 minutes. After completing the interpretation, each student designed a self-development plan based on two EI areas she wanted to improve. Development plans were shared and discussed with instructors and students began making the connections between EI and their personal and academic success. For example, one student in my FYE class made the connection that she needed to listen more and talk less during class (her empathy and interpersonal relationship scores were low), and as a result, her relationships with her peers improved noticeably.
One word of caution though – before implementing required EQ-i testing, be sure your Counseling Center staff understands the EQ-i and is prepared for a possible increase in requests for meetings. Our staff noticed about a 30% increase in appointments right after EQ-i interpretations were completed. Apparently, students’ self awareness or the desire to get more structured help improving EI led students to seek out our counselors. And, in a few cases, a score or scores (e.g., self regard)were so low that faculty referred the student for counseling.
One final note – our preliminary analysis of data from these entering first-year students showed that EI skills were predictive in two areas. First, higher optimism, along with better high school grades and higher verbal SAT score were predictive of better academic performance by mid-term of the first semester. By the end of the term, two EI subscales emerged as predictors of first to second semester retention. Higher optimism and better impulse control predicted retention better than any academic measure. As a result of this preliminary data, we plan to infuse more programming related to developing impulse control and optimism in our first-year orientation programs, our residence life programming and our FYE curriculum.
Tags: EQ-i, student success, Well-being
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