Emotional intelligence and attitude towards constructivist approach of teaching in science education: Perspective of school teachers

Science teachers ’emotional intelligence is an important motivational construct that shapes teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Teachers with a high level of emotional intelligence have been shown to be more resilient in their teaching and likely to try harder to help all students to reach their potential. Constructivism as a set of beliefs provides a model of cognition that leads directly to a method of teaching that, in turn, credits the student with the power to become an active learner. School science teachers ’emotional intelligence put a positive impact on teachers’ positive attitude towards constructivist approach in teaching. The present study was conducted to inquire the present status of West Bengal school science teachers ’emotional intelligence in advocating Constructivist approach in their teaching strategy and its relation with teacher emotional intelligence. TEII and CASST scales were administered on 836 randomly selected school science teachers for measuring their emotional intelligence variability according to their categorical variations and its relation with attitude towards Constructivist approach in teaching. The major findings were observed that the majority of science teachers (both male & female) of West Bengal possess below average level of emotional intelligence in their daily classroom teaching situation. Schools location-wise & teaching training-wise the differences of teachers ’emotional intelligence levels were significant and gender-wise the difference of teacher emotional intelligence was insignificant. Moreover, teachers’ emotional intelligence and their attitudes towards Constructivist approach shared a moderately low positive correlation.