Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Academic Performance Among Nursing Students

Emotional Intelligence (EI) describes ability, capacity, skill or a self-perceived ability, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups. The study is aimed to assess the impact of emotional intelligence on academic performance of nursing students. A quantitative approach, descriptive design was adopted in this study. 51 nursing students who were selected by convenient sampling technique and the data were collected using a Sterrett’s EI questionnaire. The majority of the samples belong to the female gender 86.3%. The majority of the samples 53% are first child in their family. Among the components of emotional intelligence, the highest mean score was for motivation (17.70) and the lowest score for self control (14.27). The emotional intelligence of 37% of the samples was excellent and 43% of the samples belong to the category of good. Regarding association between academic performance and socio demographic variables shows that annual income and area of living has significance association with academic performance at 0.05 level. The emotional intelligence is highly associated with the academic performance with the chi-square value of 11.64 which is significant at 0.05 level. Nursing students who were more emotionally intelligent performed better in both the continuous assessments and the final professional examination. Therefore, it is possible that emotional skill development may enhance nursing students’ academic performance.