Evaluating the Impact of Brief Electronic Professional Development on Emotional Intelligence and Burnout Among In-Service Educators

To determine the impact of an intervention to improve emotional intelligence (EI) and reduce burnout in educators, 48 in-service educators were randomly assigned to a control or experimental group and administered the Scales of Emotional Functioning: Educators (SEF:ED; McCallum et al., 2019) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory – Educators Survey (MBI-ES; Maslach et al., 2016) before and after intervention. The control group served as a waiting control and completed these instruments again after receiving the intervention. 70% of the participants noted the intervention “helped [them] manage [their] classroom,” though repeated measures ANOVAS yielded little evidence to support this characterization. No statistically significant interaction effects from pre to posttest occurred for the SEF:ED Total EI score (p = .92), the Emotional Awareness scale (EA; p = .78), the Emotional Management scale (EM; p = .71), or the Interpersonal Relations scale (IR; p = .45). Similar results were obtained from the MBI-ES scale: Emotional Exhaustion (EE; p = .38), Depersonalization (DP; p = .97), and Personal Accomplishment (PA; p = .49). No statistically significant main effects occurred for time (i.e., pretest to posttest), Total EI (p = .32), EA (p = .62), or EM (p = .71), but a significant main effect occurred for IR, (p < .05); means decreased. No main effects occurred between pretest and posttest means on the MBI-ES EE scale (p = .13), DP scale (p = .35), or PA scale (p =.32), or for the control and experimental groups effect on the EE scale (p = .06) or DP scale (p = .72). A significant main effect did occur between the experimental and control group for the PA scale (p < .05); the experimental group yielded a higher mean PA score than the control group. For the waiting control participants, no significant change occurred from posttest administration to post-posttest administration on the EE (p = .14) or DP scales (p = .63). A significant mean increase occurred from posttest to post-posttest on the PA scale (p = .05) after intervention. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.