The research, published in the journal Discover Social Science and Health, was conducted by Gideon Tetteh Agormedah, Edmond Kwesi Agormedah, and Samuel Kwarteng of the Department of Business and Social Sciences Education. The team set out to determine whether emotional intelligence, often abbreviated as EI, predicts the level of teaching anxiety experienced by preservice business teachers during their practicum, and whether gender changes the strength of that relationship. Their findings point to a clear conclusion: emotional intelligence does influence teaching anxiety, and the effect holds regardless of whether the trainee is a man or a woman.

To understand why this matters, it helps to unpack the theoretical scaffolding the researchers chose. The study is grounded in the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, a framework originally developed by psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in the 1980s. The model holds that stress is not simply a property of demanding situations, nor purely a feature of individual temperament. Instead, stress emerges from a transaction between the person and the environment: first, the individual appraises whether a situation threatens their well-being, and second, they appraise what resources they have to cope with it. A practicum classroom can therefore be read by one trainee as an intolerable threat and by another as a challenging but manageable task, depending on the cognitive and emotional resources each brings to the encounter.

Emotional intelligence fits into this model as exactly such a resource. Broadly, EI refers to the capacity to perceive, understand, regulate, and use emotions, both one’s own and those of other people. A trainee teacher high in EI can recognize the physical signs of their own rising panic, reframe a hostile-looking classroom as a normal feature of adolescent behavior, and modulate their emotional response before it spirals into full anxiety. A trainee low in EI, by contrast, may experience the same classroom events as an escalating series of threats with no obvious coping route. In transactional terms, EI shapes the secondary appraisal, the assessment of coping resources, and thereby determines how much stress the practicum ultimately produces.

The researchers tested this logic with an explanatory correlational cross-sectional design. Rather than sampling a subset of the population, they used a census approach, enrolling all 107 preservice business teachers available to the study, a group preparing to teach accounting and management subjects. Data were collected through a closed-ended structured questionnaire, a format that allows respondents to rate their emotional intelligence and their teaching anxiety on fixed scales and permits statistical comparison across the whole group. Because every member of the population was included, the study avoids the sampling bias that can creep in when only volunteers or easily reachable students participate.

The analysis proceeded in two statistical stages. First, the team used linear regression to test whether emotional intelligence scores predicted teaching anxiety levels during the practicum. Regression analysis estimates the direction and strength of the relationship between a predictor variable and an outcome, allowing researchers to ask whether higher EI is systematically associated with lower anxiety. Second, and more subtly, the researchers employed the PROCESS moderation procedure developed by statistician Andrew Hayes, a widely used tool for testing whether a third variable changes the strength or direction of a relationship between two others. Here, the third variable was gender. The question was not whether men and women differ in anxiety on average, but whether the protective effect of emotional intelligence operates differently for each gender.

The results answered both questions. Emotional intelligence did significantly influence the level of teaching anxiety reported by the preservice business teachers, consistent with the transactional prediction that stronger emotional coping resources should buffer the stress of the practicum. Yet the moderation analysis returned a null result: gender did not moderate the relationship. In other words, the anxiety-reducing benefit of emotional intelligence appears to operate similarly for male and female trainees. This finding is notable because much of the literature on teaching anxiety has documented gender differences in self-reported anxiety, and one might have expected the coping mechanism to work differently across genders. The Cape Coast data suggest that the underlying psychological machinery is shared.

There are technical caveats worth keeping in view. A cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it can establish that EI and anxiety are related as theory predicts, but it cannot prove that emotional intelligence causes lower anxiety; it is at least conceivable that less anxious trainees find it easier to report high emotional competence. The modest sample of 107 participants, while a complete census of its population, is small by the standards of moderation analysis, and null moderation findings can sometimes reflect limited statistical power rather than a true absence of effect. Self-report questionnaires, meanwhile, depend on respondents’ willingness and ability to describe their own emotional lives accurately. None of these limitations undermines the study’s core contribution, but they mark the boundaries within which its conclusions should be read.

The practical implications, however, reach well beyond the statistical tables. Teacher education programs in many countries devote extensive time to subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical technique, while treating the emotional demands of teaching as something trainees will simply absorb through experience. The Ghanaian researchers argue that this passive approach should change. Their central recommendation is that stakeholders in teacher education be intentional about incorporating structured emotional intelligence development into the preparation of future business teachers, so that trainees enter the practicum equipped to manage the emotional pressures it generates. Structured EI development can take many forms, from explicit instruction in emotion recognition and regulation to supervised reflection on stressful classroom episodes, role-play exercises, and peer-support structures that normalize anxiety rather than stigmatize it.

The focus on business teachers is itself significant. Preservice accounting and management teachers occupy a distinctive niche: they must translate technical, often abstract content into engaging lessons while managing classrooms that may regard their subject as dry or intimidating. That combination of content-delivery pressure and classroom-management demand makes the practicum an especially potent stressor for this group, and it makes the finding that EI buffers their anxiety particularly actionable. If emotional competence can be built before trainees ever face their first class, the practicum could shift from a trial by fire into a genuinely formative experience.

More broadly, the study adds to a growing body of evidence that the emotional dimension of teaching is not a soft afterthought but a core professional competency. The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping reminds us that the same classroom can be experienced as threat or challenge depending on the appraisals a teacher brings to it, and emotional intelligence is one of the few trainable resources that shapes those appraisals directly. The Cape Coast team’s finding that this resource works across genders simplifies the intervention problem: teacher educators do not need gender-specific emotional training tracks, only well-designed programs that raise EI for everyone. As education systems worldwide grapple with teacher attrition and burnout, evidence that a trainable psychological skill can reduce the anxiety of the very first teaching experience offers a promising, and refreshingly practical, point of intervention. The study, published open access with a permanent DOI, invites teacher educators everywhere to ask whether their programs are teaching the emotional curriculum as seriously as the academic one.

Subject of Research: The relationship between emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety among preservice business teachers

Article Title: Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences

Article References: Agormedah, G. T., Agormedah, E. K., & Kwarteng, S. (2026). Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Keywords: emotional intelligence, teaching anxiety, teaching practicum, preservice teachers, business education, teacher education, stress and coping, Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, gender differences, Ghana, moderation analysis, teacher training

The research team, led by Jorge-Agustín Zapatero-Ayuso of the Complutense University of Madrid together with colleagues at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, conducted an unusually comprehensive inquiry into how competence develops during the Practicum of Early Childhood and Primary Education degrees in Spain. Rather than surveying students alone, the researchers built a multivoiced dataset from 95 participants: 33 in-depth interviews, 5 focus groups, 22 life stories, and 7 practicum diaries or memoirs. This triangulation of narrative techniques was deliberate. Teacher competence, the authors argue, is not a checklist of isolated skills but a complex, situated construct that only becomes visible through the integrated mobilisation of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in real classrooms, and only surfaces fully when examined through multiple lenses.

Technically, the study followed a qualitative, interpretative case-study design centred on the Practicum programme at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Albacete. That programme is structured in two phases. Practicum I, running from September to December of the third year, places student teachers in classrooms where they observe school organisation, design and implement activities, and evaluate their impact. Practicum II, from January to April of the fourth year, demands far more: planning and delivering an entire didactic unit aligned with the school programme, assessing learning outcomes, and participating in tutoring activities with students and families. In each phase, every trainee is shadowed by both a school mentor and a university supervisor, whose joint observations and evaluations shape the final assessment.

Analysing the transcripts and narratives with ATLAS.ti software, the researchers organised their coding around three core competence areas drawn from prior systematic reviews: classroom management and control, attention to diversity and inclusive practices, and the design and use of teaching resources and methodologies. Multiple analysts independently coded the data, met regularly to resolve discrepancies, and refined category definitions through consensus, an iterative process the authors describe as essential to the trustworthiness of their findings. What emerged was a picture in which the domains that worried trainee teachers most—controlling a class and meeting individual differences—were simultaneously the domains where they reported the most profound professional learning, a paradox that reinforces the practicum’s formative value precisely because it is demanding.

Classroom management emerged as the single most pressing concern. Student teachers described moments of genuine disorientation when confronted with disruptive sixth-graders who would simply ignore them, or with children who talked back while the trainee, lacking any rehearsed strategy, could only stay quiet. Many reported feeling stripped of authority, perceived by pupils as closer to a peer than a teacher. One graduate went as far as advocating for a dedicated subject on classroom management techniques within the degree itself. Yet the strategies that worked were concrete and teachable: grouping pupils by affinity so that cooperative work flowed more smoothly, maintaining constant communication with students, and adapting expectations to the social context of the school, which one graduate described as decisively shaping the educational actions possible in a challenging neighbourhood.

The mentors’ perspective on this domain was unequivocal. School mentors identified classroom control and climate as the principal arena of competence development, and they credited the combination of observation, guided questioning, and day-to-day immersion for most of the progress trainees made. Learning, in this account, happens when a student teacher watches an experienced teacher defuse a conflict, then asks afterward whether a particular response was well or badly handled, and how to improve it next time. This finding elevates the school mentor from a passive assessor to the central pedagogical authority of the practicum experience, echoing a growing body of international literature on mentoring quality as the decisive variable in placement success.

Attention to diversity produced the study’s most uncomfortable findings. While many participants credited the practicum with meaningful learning about individualising instruction—guided by mentors who explained how to work with children with Down syndrome or autism, or by counsellors who prepared complementary activities for a high-ability pupil—a substantial training gap surfaced repeatedly. Graduates confessed that they knew the theoretical catalogue of disorders but not how to actually work with any of them, and students criticised university preparation that taught them to support a child one-to-one without teaching them how to include that child within the ordinary life of the classroom. Negative emotions compounded the problem: trainees described insecurity in meetings with parents, discouragement when facing a fourth-grader who could barely read, and the sheer overwhelm of being one adult responsible for twenty-five children with widely varying needs.

The compensating supports, participants agreed, were relational rather than curricular. Continuous, clear communication from mentors about each pupil’s particularities proved essential, as did the guidance of school counsellors and special education teachers, and structured coordination between teaching staff and families, often maintained through daily communication books. Trainee teachers who were permitted to observe tutorials and family exchanges—even without intervening directly—reported identifying the needs of students with special educational requirements and internalising the professional protocols for responding to them. The authors argue that these findings justify more rigorous selection, preparation, and active involvement of school mentors, particularly in fostering inclusive practices, and they highlight the value of multidisciplinary teams in scaffolding diversity-related learning.

In sharp contrast, the third domain—resources and methodologies—was where trainee teachers shone. Participants reported blending traditional techniques with innovative ones, introducing digital boards, flashcard games, escape rooms, and creative manipulative materials, and preparing backup activities to manage classroom time efficiently. Experienced teachers welcomed this influx, describing the practicum as a genuine exchange in which novices brought fresh methodological knowledge while veterans shared hard-won experience. Notably, trainees showed a new openness to conventional strategies previously dismissed as outdated. Even here, however, mentors and inspectors issued a caution: student-designed lessons often proved too ambitious, and the most successful interventions were those progressively adapted to each mentor’s style and each classroom’s realities. Inspectors described didactic units that took shape gradually, shedding unrealistic elements week by week.

The study’s deeper conclusion is that the practicum works, but works unevenly. It compensates for curricular deficiencies in classroom management and inclusive education, provided mentors guide the process, yet it operates under a predominantly application-focused conception of competence that leaves metacognition, professional responsibility, and reflective-critical awareness underdeveloped. University supervisors, remarkably, barely registered as significant figures in participants’ accounts of competence development—an absence the authors flag as both a limitation and a research priority. Their recommendations are concrete: dedicated courses, seminars, and workshops targeting classroom management and diversity, stronger university–school collaboration, and deliberate cultivation of reflection. The ultimate stake, the authors stress, is not the trainees’ report cards but the wellbeing and optimal development of the children those trainees will one day teach.

Subject of Research: Competence development of pre-service early childhood and primary education teachers during the teaching practicum

Article Title: Competence development of pre-service teachers during Practicum: a qualitative study from the perspective of its protagonists

Article References: Zapatero-Ayuso, J.-A., Díaz-Carretero, A., Gil-García, M.-I., & Gil-Madrona, P. (2026). Competence development of pre-service teachers during Practicum: a qualitative study from the perspective of its protagonists. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00057-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00057-0

Keywords: teaching practicum, pre-service teachers, classroom management, inclusive education, teacher training, school mentoring, competence development, qualitative research, early childhood education, primary education, university-school collaboration, teacher professional development