The ability of trainee teachers to read emotions will be investigated in a newVictorian project aimed at improving teacher effectiveness.
Next week, education students at Deakin University will be the first in the country to be quizzed on their capacity to recognise and manage emotions in the classroom, as part of a project on "emotional intelligence".
Australian and American studies suggest that emotional intelligence can measure how well people understand their own feelings and recognise emotional states in others.
Emotional intelligence is a relatively new area in psychology and, until recently, was mainly used in the corporate world to identify leadership and teamwork skills.
However, the project's team leader, Chris Perry, said emotional intelligence was also useful in helping trainee teachers "understand themselves better and the role of teachers".
She said it was vital that teachers had the emotional intelligence to identify students who felt frustrated or sad, and be able to channel those emotions into something positive, such as motivating pupils to finish tasks.
Teachers also had to understand what may upset them in the classroom and the effect this would have on students. "We think that good teachers should be those who are highly intelligent emotionally," Dr Perry said.
She said the project team, which also included Deakin academics Ian Ball and Elizabeth Stacey, had spent the past two years investigating emotional intelligence and formulating a student questionnaire to gauge emotional intelligence levels.
About 450 second-year students studying primary and secondary education will complete the questionnaire, which includes real-life classroom scenarios. They will choose one response from six alternatives to sum up what they would do in each situation. Each alternative reflects an emotional intelligence development stage, ranging from low to sophisticated. But Dr Perry said that, unlike IQ tests, there would be no right or wrong answers. There would be more and less effective ways of dealing with emotion in the classroom.
The data, which is expected to be collated by the end of the year, will be discussed with students next year to examine how their feelings affect their work and decisions. This should help them learn how to better manage their emotions and those of their pupils. They could use this to help children overcome their tendency to bully, for example.
"We can teach emotional intelligence," Dr Perry said.
Deakin is planning to gauge the emotional intelligence of experienced teachers next year.
Benjamin Palmer, an emotional intelligence researcher at Swinburne University, agreed the psychology could be applied to education. He said emotional-intelligence testing was being used in Melbourne with gifted students who had social problems. The results, he said, were encouraging, with principals reporting that the students were getting on better with their peers.
One of the world's first scientific emotional-intelligence tests was developed by Swinburne's centre for neuropsychopharmacology, which is devising one for adolescents.
Research at Swinburne shows that emotional intelligence is as important an indicator of potential as IQ, and in many cases more so.
Mr Palmer said although emotional intelligence was an emerging psychology, it had been around since 1990 and was not a fad. US psychologist Daniel Goleman, who is a former New York Times writer on behavioural sciences, put the psychology on the map with his 1995 bestseller, Emotional Intelligence.