Scholarly Article

In the scholarly article, "Non-Cognitive Predictors Of Student Success In College" (2012),  Larry Sparkman claims that the variables of Empathy, Social Responsibility, Flexibility, and Impulse Control help determine the graduation rate amongst students in universities. Sparkman supports this claim by testing participants that were traditional students who initially enrolled as freshmen for the fall semester of 2002 and attended freshman orientation the weekend prior to the beginning of classes. In this study, emotional intelligence was operationalized as 15 components: self-regard, emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, independence, self-actualization, empathy, social responsibility, interpersonal relationship, reality testing, flexibility, problem solving, stress tolerance, impulse control, optimism, and happiness. His purpose is to provide evidence that emotional intelligence is imperative in order to graduate from a university within four years. With the plethora of data as well as the language utilized within the article, Sparkman appears to be writing to a well-educated audience with interest in the success rate of college students.