Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?

By Jennifer Kahn
The New York Times
Originally published September 15, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”

A growing number of educators and psychologists now believe that the answer to that question is in school. George Lucas’s Edutopia foundation has lobbied for the teaching of social and emotional skills for the past decade; the State of Illinois passed a bill in 2003 making “social and emotional learning” a part of school curriculums. Thousands of schools now use one of the several dozen programs, including Brackett’s own, that have been approved as “evidence-based” by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit. All told, there are now tens of thousands of emotional-literacy programs running in cities nationwide.

The theory that kids need to learn to manage their emotions in order to reach their potential grew out of the research of a pair of psychology professors — John Mayer, at the University of New Hampshire, and Peter Salovey, at Yale.

The entire story is here.

In Trying to Test Students' Ethics, Colleges Find It Hard to Do the Right Thing

by Peter Schmidt
Chronicle of Higher Education


Union College, long focused on engineering and the liberal arts, five years ago adopted a new educational mission: teaching its students to be ethical.



It established an Ethics Across the Curriculum program that encourages faculty members to weave discussions of ethics into all of their courses, no matter the subject.



Although faculty throughout the college's four academic divisions have gotten behind the effort, it is hard to tell what, if any, effect it is having.



Here and elsewhere in academe, ethics instruction remains a means to unclear ends.



<snip>



"Ethical reasoning and action" is one of the "essential learning outcomes" that the Association of American Colleges and Universities says is "best developed by a contemporary liberal education."



But these days, making that claim is not enough: The accountability movement has put colleges under pressure to assess students' progress in meeting all educational goals.



Assessing ethical learning is especially challenging.



Sure, colleges can test students' recall of class lectures or assigned readings.



But being able to parrot Plato is a far cry from skillfully applying moral philosophy to today's moral dilemmas.



<snip>



Colleges might even be able to measure whether their students have become more sophisticated in the thought processes they use in working through ethical problems.



But the most widely used instruments for measuring moral reasoning are intended for research or to evaluate institutions, not for student grading, and educators disagree on their validity.

When it comes to measuring whether ethics instruction sticks, making students more likely to do the right thing throughout their lives, about all colleges can do is hope.



<snip>



But the truth is that there is no telling whether today's college student will go on to become a mensch or the next Bernie Madoff.



Ethical development lies "at the outermost ring" of the learning outcomes institutions are able to measure, says Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis who has extensively studied assessment practices.



Of the tests of ethical learning devised so far, she says, "I don't know of anything that is even beginning to be universally accepted."



<snip>



Among the many challenges in assessing students' development is the lack of universally accepted "right" answers to many moral and ethical problems.



"By definition, you are coming up with some sort of normative value judgment on what the right outcomes are for students," says Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University and co-author of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.



"It is hard to get objective measures that are not tied in with cultural assumptions."



If colleges send students the message that there exists a correct answer to any given ethical question, Mr. Arum says, they are likely to run into a problem routinely encountered by social scientists whose research involves surveys: People often answer a question with the response they perceive as most acceptable to others, failing to say what they truly believe.



Deni Elliott, a professor of media ethics at the University of South Florida and the founder of ethics centers at both Dartmouth College and the University of Montana, argues that colleges need to separate "instructional objective from pedagogical hope."



<snip>



Union College has left it up to faculty members to individually devise ways to determine how well students absorb and apply ethics lessons.



Many of its faculty members gauge learning mainly by judging how well students identify and analyze ethical problems in writing assignments, on essay tests, and in classroom discussions.



That approach, widely used throughout academe, puts a premium on ethical reasoning and rewards students for demonstrating critical thinking.



In focusing on cognitive development, however, such assessments get at only one of two key aspects of ethical thinking, argue experts like David T. Ozar, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and veteran instructor of journalistic and medical ethics.



Also important, he says, is affective learning, the acquisition of attitudes and values that leave one more predisposed to act ethically.



"It is really hard to measure ethical learning because it's not declarative or semantic knowledge, but, like any expertise, it is knowing the right thing to do in the right way at the right time," says Darcia F. Narváez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.



In her research, she has found that intuition plays such a big role in moral decisions that she argues it is a mistake to ignore its influence.



<snip>



The Union program seeks to promote ethical development through both the application of moral philosophy to various academic fields and practical discussions of the ethical codes under which those fields operate.



<snip>



Faculty members involved in the effort met this winter to compare notes on approaches that seemed to be improving their students' ability to spot and deal with ethical problems posed to them in assignments and on tests.



At about the same time, however, a committee of students, administrators, and faculty members gathered elsewhere on campus to talk over an effort to stem cheating through the adoption of a new honor code.



Kristen A. Bidoshi, Union's dean of studies, estimates that she deals with roughly 200 cases of academic dishonesty each year, out of a total undergraduate enrollment of about 2,500.



Claire M. Bracken, assistant professor of English at Union College and a member of the steering committee for its ethics-education effort, says she is hopeful that getting students "passionate and engaged with these issues" will lead them to retain the ethics lessons learned in college classrooms and behave more ethically throughout life.



But, she acknowledges, "There is no good way of knowing what they are thinking when they leave."


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Thanks to Ken Pope for the information.