The Causal Relationships of Emotional and General Intelligence with the School Performance as Mediated by Test Anxiety and School Adjustment in First Grade Students of Borujerd Public High Schools

In the past, the most important correlate of school performance was intellectual functioning, especially IQ, and little attention was paid to emotions. But children experience all kinds of emotions in school. Academic emotions are a new field of research in educational psychology. Research has shown a relationship between emotional intelligence and school performance. School anxiety is also indicated to be related to emotional intelligence. The results of different studies have shown that the higher the emotional intelligence is the less the school anxiety would be. One kind of school anxiety is test anxiety. Test anxiety and adjustment problems in school can have negative effects on school performance. The relationship between the emotional and general intelligence and school performance can be mediated by means of increasing adjustment or decreasing test anxiety. Research Question: Therefore, the research question of this study was as follows: "Does the model of relationships of IQ and emotional intelligence to school performance, mediated by test anxiety and school adjustment, fit the data?" Also the purpose of this study was to test the direct and indirect paths of the model. To this end, a model was designed with two mediators, test anxiety and adjustment, with emotional and intellectual intelligences as exogenous and school performance as endogenous variables. A sample of 395 first-grade high school students (197 male and 198 female) were selected randomly by multiple stage sampling method. In this research, the students completed Personal Information Test, Raven Test, Emotional Intelligence Inventory by Petrides and Furnham, Test Anxiety of Speilberger Inventory and the Adjustment Inventory, for school aged students. The school performance of the students was defined as the average score of their final exams of that year. The statistical method employed in the study was structural equation modeling. The results of the study indicated that the correlation matrix was meaningful for all the variables in the model. The analysis of the model showed that the proposed model fitted the data. The direct path from IQ to school performance and adjustment was positive and significant. Also, the direct path from adjustment to school performance was positive and significant. Furthermore, the direct path from emotional intelligence to school performance was negative and significant; from emotional intelligence to adjustment was positive and significant, and from emotional intelligence to test anxiety and school performance were negative but significant respectively. Similarly, the relationship of IQ to test anxiety was negative and significant. Also, the relationship of IQ to school performance was positive and significant. Finally, the mediating roles of adjustment and test anxiety were confirmed. The model indices were also indicated to fit the data. The results showed that the path between the intellectual intelligence and school performance was positive and significant. This result was expected because intellectual functioning is associated with solving problems and learning abilities in school. Also the results showed that the relationships of intellectual intelligence with adjustment and test anxiety were meaningful but in different directions (positive for adjustment and negative for test anxiety). The literature shows that students with higher IQ can adjust themselves better, and as they have higher intellectual abilities the remembering and retrieval of the school materials are easier for them. This may cause less test anxiety and more adjustment in school. The path between the emotional intelligence and school performance was negative but significant, indicating that the higher the emotional intelligence the lower the student’s school performance will be. This result was not congruent with previous studies. One reason could lay in the measurement of school performance which was grade point average and not a standard test. Another reason for this result could be the controversies around the construct 'emotional intelligence', as some researchers believe that it may not have linear relationship with school performance. It may be that some teachers in some cultures do not like students who are open in expressing their emotions or are assertive. There was also a positive relationship between the emotional intelligence and adjustment. This is clear because those who have higher emotional intelligence can express and control their emotions and understand other people's emotions. The results also indicated that the relationship between the emotional intelligence and test anxiety is negative. When emotional intelligence is high the individual can manage his/her emotions, has a good control and can perform under pressure, therefore the test anxiety may not be high. The path between the test anxiety and school performance was negative, indicating the higher the test anxiety the lower the school grade will be. Finally, congruent with other studies, the relation of adjustment and school performance was positive. It may be that the adjusted person has less psychological problems and could perform better in stressful situations. The mediating roles of adjustment and test anxiety were also confirmed. Different studies have indicated that intellectual intelligence, by increasing adjustment and decreasing test anxiety, can have positive effect on performance. The indirect path from emotional intelligence to school performance, through test anxiety and adjustment, showed that emotional intelligence can increase school performance indirectly.