SMART MINDS, STRONG EMOTIONS: A STUDY ON THE LINK BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AT SECONDARY LEVEL IN PAKISTAN

Emotional intelligence is a significant construct in educational psychology and is considered essential for success in learning, teaching, and professional life. At the secondary level, it is closely linked to students’ academic performance, highlighting the need for schools to foster students’ emotional competencies. This study aimed to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance among 10th-grade students in Lahore, Pakistan. A quantitative research design was employed, and 300 students were selected through a stratified random sampling technique from ten schools in Lahore District. Daniel Goleman’s (1998) competence model was used as the theoretical framework, and the Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) adapted from Iqbal (2022) was utilized for data collection. Academic performance was measured using the final scores from the 9th-grade Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Lahore 2024 examination, covering six compulsory subjects: Tarjumat-ul-Quran, Urdu, English, Pakistan Studies, Mathematics, and Islamiyah. Descriptive statistics were computed, and Pearson’s correlation was applied using SPSS. The results revealed that female students were more emotionally stable and achieved higher academic scores than male students. Overall, emotional intelligence showed weak, non-significant correlations with total academic achievement and individual subjects, with only self-awareness demonstrating a meaningful positive relationship with performance. Strong correlations were found among the academic subjects themselves, indicating consistent achievement across them. These findings suggest that factors other than emotional intelligence, such as cognitive abilities or instructional quality, may have a greater influence on students’ academic success.