The purposes of this study are to examine effects of emotional intelligence of specialized high school students on school adjustment, provide information that is necessary to understand characteristics of specialized high school students and base data that is necessary to study on countermeasures for school adjustment problems, be helpful to develop, research, and adapt emotional intelligence improvement program suitable for the level of students’ emotional intelligence, and enhance specialized high school students’ level of emotional intelligence. To achieve those purposes, survey was conducted for 760 students of 18 specialized technical high school in 5 districts through questionnaires organized by emotional intelligence measurement tools(40 questions) and school adjustment measurement tools(20 questions) including general characteristics of students. The conclusions of this study are as follows.
First, emotional intelligence of specialized high school students was on normal level. Among sub-factors of emotional intelligence, emotional knowledge utilization was higher than other factors and emotion controlling ability was the lowest. It implies that students have highly detailed understanding of emotion, but are still poor at attitude or countermeasures for emotion. In addition, it’s necessary to enhance students’ emotion controlling ability if proceeding the program enhancing emotional intelligence.
School adjustment was on normal level, but students of low emotional intelligence must make an effort to enhance emotional intelligence in spite of low school adjustment or high school adjustment.
Second, emotional intelligence and school adjustment of specialized high school students was different by major satisfaction and number of specialized licenses. It shows that students of high emotional intelligence are highly satisfied with major, students of high major satisfaction have high school adjustment, and there is a possibility to make a positive effect on acquisition of licenses.
Third, emotional intelligence shows significant static correlations with school adjustment and explanation of emotional intelligence for school adjustment was 33.6%. It shows that emotional intelligence can be an alternative to enhance school adjustment of specialized high school students. In addition, emotional intelligence showed the biggest explanation on peer relation among sub-factors of school adjustment. It shows that students of high emotional intelligence have better peer relations than students of low emotional intelligence and as peer relations are better, self-efficacy, class immersion, recovery resilience, etc. are high, so school adjustment is also high.
However, among sub-factors of emotional intelligence, the effects of utilization of emotional knowledge on school adjustment were statistically significant. It was generally higher than other sub-factors of emotional intelligence, so most of students already understand or feel knowledge about emotion or subtle emotion well and it is not greatly helpful to school adjustment from an angle of simple understanding of complicated emotion or feeling. Therefore, it’s necessary to educate them through emotional intelligence improvement program so as to enhance their emotional intelligence to high level(emotion controlling ability).