Can MI be an Effective Tool in the Classroom

Anna Munger, Amanda Sanders, and Teri Smith

Brigham Young University-Idaho

Introduction

It wasn’t until the age of four that the boy every spoke an understandable word. And it wasn’t until the age of seven that the boy first began to read. His parents considered him “sub-normal” and even a teacher of his thought him “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” This student was even expelled from school. Even more remarkable, however, was that in 1921 this boy, whose name has shaped the world of science as we know it, won the Noble Peace Price. His name? Albert Einstein.

            So many students, like Einstein, struggled in school until they found their specialties. It is vital to realize that a student’s capability can’t solely be judged according to the student’s academic performance. It is the duty of educators, parents, and others who work with the youth in our schools to understand that a student’s capability should be based upon their individual learning style. This learning style is affected and determined by many factors in a student’s life; one of them however, is the unique and individual make-up of one’s brain.

            For this reason, many educators have looked to Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences to help them meet the individual learning styles of students in their classroom.

The Human Mind

            Sitting in the classroom staring into space, the child looks like he or she is paying attention but really is off in their own world. Why is that? Most of the other students are participating in the lesson. Sometimes lessons are just boring. But there was a lot of effort and time put into that lesson. How can it be boring? The lesson might be interesting and engaging for some and not for others. Why? It is widely accepted that every person learns differently. Some learn with their hands, by doing, others by listening, and others visually. Still others require a combination of teaching methods. Howard Gardner categorizes the different ways of learning are categorized in a method called Multiple Intelligences.  He has done extensive research and posits that there are seven different learning styles. A child not paying attention to a lesson may have a different learning style than the one being used.  It is important, as a teacher, to know the Multiple Intelligence theory so that teachers can cater their teaching to students’ individual learning styles.   

            The different learning styles are important for the teachers to know so all students can understand the material covered in the classroom. Howard Gardner identifies these learning styles as follows: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Raedurn, 1999). Individual learning styles exist because each person’s brain is “programmed” differently.

            The human brain is made up of two hemispheres: the right and the left. There is a saying by left-handed people: “if you are right handed you are not in your right mind.” That statement is true to a point. The left half of the brain controls the right half of the body and the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. But learning works differently.  Each hemisphere has its specialties, and the two hemispheres also work together as a whole to accomplish the learning (Brain Hemispheres).

            Each hemisphere has its own responsibilities. The left hemisphere is responsible for learning from part to whole, is stimulated by function, phonetic reader, likes words, symbols, letters, unrelated factual information and detailed orderly instructions, prefers to read about it first, prefers internal focus, wants structure, and predictability. The right hemisphere is responsible for learning whole first, then parts, is stimulated by appearance, whole language reader, wants pictures, graphs, and charts, would rather see it or experience it first, finds relationships in learning, spontaneous, go with the flow, likely external focus, likes open-endedness and surprises (Brian Hemispheres). People who are left handed generally follow that learning pattern.  So do right handed people follow the other learning pattern.

            Walbolt (1997) finds that the brain hemispheres are not the only part of the brain connected with learning. For instance the brain stem controls breathing and circulation. The cerebrum handles the memory, learning, speech, and conscious control of movement. Those parts of the brain are important to learning and keeping memory. There is a process that the brain follows when trying to commit something to memory. A thought or memory is an electrical impulse that is sent through billions of nerve cells to be processed and is put into the brain’s memory.  This is what happens:

            “A thought, in the form of an electrical impulse, travels to the synaptic knob of a nerve cell.  The electrical current causes vesicles to move to the synapse’s surface and release chemicals known as neurotransmitters.  Specialized sites at the receiving nerve cell absorbs the neurotransmitters.  A chemical signal is sent down the dendrite to the cell body.  The chemical change in the cell body around the nucleus causes an electrical signal to shoot down the cell’s axon and off to another nerve cell” (Walbolt, 1991, para. 2).

When the electrical impulse, or the thought, hits the cells in the brain, chemicals have to change for the electrical impulse to take effect and become a memory. The brain chemical that helps determine what we remember and what we forget during the memory process is called CREB.  

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The 25th anniversary

The 25^th anniversary of the publication of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Copyright 2008 Howard Gardner. All rights Reserved.

In 1983, psychologist Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind, the book in which he introduced his ‘theory of multiple intelligences’ (MI theory).  Gardner wrote this book as a psychologist and thought that he was addressing principally his colleagues in psychology.  He devoted little of the book to educational implications and never expected that his ideas would be picked up by educators, first in the United States and then, eventually, in many countries across the globe.  During this year, when Gardner turns 65, he will be making a number of presentations in which he reflects on the course of his thinking over the years, as well as his speculations about the future course of work in this tradition.

While many individuals believe that Gardner set out to dislodge IQ and standard intelligence theory, in fact he did not have this target in mind when he began the research that led to the theory.   Indeed, as one who had done well on standardized tests and had been trained in the Piagetian tradition, he had devoted little thought or study to theories of intelligence altogether.  Rather, it was his empirical work with normal and gifted children, on the one hand, and with brain-damaged patients on the other, that convinced him that the standard view of a ‘single, unitary, undecomposable intelligence’ could not be correct.  The work of synthesizing that led to MI theory consisted of surveying a whole set of literature and disciplines that might yield a more comprehensive and more veridical notion of human intellect.

The most important steps taken by Gardner involved arriving at a working definition of ‘an intelligence’ and devising a set of criteria of what counts as an intelligence. As he describes it, an intelligence is a biological and psychological potential to solve problems and/or create products that are valued in one or more cultural contexts. Armed with this definition and these criteria, Gardner identified seven relatively autonomous capacities that he named the multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.  In more recent writings, Gardner added an eighth (naturalist) intelligence and continues to speculate about a possible ninth (existential) intelligence.

The two most important scientific implications of the theory are complementary. On the one hand, all human beings possess these 8 or 9 intelligences—that is what makes us human.  On the other hand, no two human beings—not even identical twins—exhibit precisely the same profile of intelligences. That is because even when genetics are controlled for (as is the case with monozygotic twins), individuals have different life experiences and are also motivated to differentiate themselves from one another.

In part because he had not thought of himself as an educator, Gardner did not lay out—and indeed never has laid out-- a program for the education of multiple intelligences. He was amazed when, shortly after the book was published, a group of elementary school teachers from Indianapolis approached him and said that they wanted to start an “MI School.” For over twenty years, Gardner has been an informal adviser to the Key Learning Community; but he has always stressed that the teachers are the educators, the school people, and his views should be take as advisory only.  He has assumed the same low-key stance toward the many other educators around the world who have approached him with requests for help in setting up an “MI school.”

For the same reason, Gardner kept silent for a decade when individuals approached him for comments on various implementations of his ideas. Only when he saw his ideas radically abused, as happened in Australia in the early 1990s, did he intervene. (Gardner objected strenuously to a statewide educational intervention that described major racial and ethnic groups in Australia in terms of the intelligences that they purportedly had and the ones that they purportedly lacked). 

Spurred by this “wake up call”, Gardner did write about the various myths and misunderstanding of MI theory—for example, confusing an intelligence with a learning style, or asserting that all children are strong in at least one intelligence.  Moreover, he now believes that any serious application of MI ideas should entail at least two components;

1. An attempt to individuate education as much as possible.  The advent of personal computers should make this goal much easier to attain.
2. A commitment to convey important ideas and concepts in a number of different formats.  This activation of multiple intelligences holds promise of reaching many more students and also demonstrating what it means to understand a topic thoroughly and deeply.

Looking toward the future, Gardner expects MI theory and practice to expand in a number of directions:

1. Application of these ideas in institutions other than schools—for example, museums, government, the workplace;
2. Devising of computer software and virtual realities that present or teach the same topics via the activation of several intelligences;
3. Exploration of the genetic bases for the various intelligences.  When Gardner began his work, almost nothing was known about the genetics of various abilities.  This situation should change dramatically in coming years.
4. Refinement of our understanding of the neural bases of intelligences and the ways that they develop and interact.  Gardner’s original theory was based in significant part on the knowledge of brain specialization available around 1980.   There has been an explosion of knowledge about neural networks and connections since this time, as well as the emergence of many new techniques for assessing brain structure and functioning in vivo. This knowledge can and will lead to a superior delineation of human capacities, and, in all probability, to a more authoritative statement of the boundaries between and across different human intelligences.
5. Study of how MI theory has been implemented around the world.  While MI ideas have been picked up in a broad range of developed and developing societies, the ways in which these ideas have been used, and the obstacles that they have encountered, differ dramatically and at times in unexpected ways.  To document this trend, Gardner and colleagues Jie-Qi Chen and Seana Moran, are editing a book that contains over two dozen essays by theorists and practitioners from a wide gamut of countries and institutions.  Among the most striking is the Explorama at Danfoss Universe in Denmark, an entire theme park based on MI theory. Many of the authors gathered at the March 2008 meeting of the American Educational Research Association; it is expected that the edited book, to be published by Jossey-Bass, will appear in 2009. 
   In addition to the question of how MI theory has been understood and fashioned in different soils,  the book will also address the more general issue of how ‘educational memes’ travel.
6. Synthesis of MI theory with other work currently being undertaken by Gardner and colleagues. Over the last dozen years, Gardner and a team of researchers have been studying ‘good work’ (goodworkproject.org).  This work focuses on the benevolent uses to which human intelligence, creativity, and leadership can be (but are not necessarily) applied.  More recently, Gardner’s research group has also begun to examine how the current generation of young people is being affected by the new digital media—another area ripe for investigation in terms of MI theory.   Finally, Gardner has ventured into the policy arena, as in his recent book Five Minds for the Future.   Gardner is pondering the relationships – as well as the tensions—between how human beings are understood by scientific study (as in MI theory) and how they should be nurtured by educational institutions.

April 2008

Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Summary of a Presentation at the IVU World Vegetarian Congress,

July 27-August 2, 2008, Dresden, Germany

by

George Jacobs

Vegetarian Society (Singapore)

www.vegetarian-society.org

Acknowledgements

The basic ideas presented here come from the work of Howard Gardner (www.howardgardner.com) , a professor of Cognition (thinking and perceiving) and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and from the works of these other educators:

• Thomas Armstrong www.thomasarmstrong.com
• David Lazear, New Dimensions in Learning: www.multi-intell.com
• Spencer and Miguel Kagan, Kagan Publications: www.KaganOnline.com.

Introduction

This presentation includes a very brief history of Multiple Intelligences (MI), an explanation of what is meant by MI and each of the eight currently identified intelligences, and an opportunity for readers to reflect on their own MI profile. Then, the final and most important part of the presentation involves consideration of how to apply MI in vegetarian education work.

Briefly, MI can be summarized in the following rhyme adapted from Kagan and Kagan:

The more ways we teach, the more people we reach

And, the more ways we reach each

And, the more deeply what we teach will reach

In other words, by teaching the what, why and how of vegetarianism in a variety of ways, we are more likely to connect with more people, and each person is likely to better grasp and remember the ideas presented.

A Brief History of MI

The first IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test was developed about 1900. For many years thereafter, the concept of a single measure of intelligence was widely accepted in education and psychology. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, cognitive theories became dominant in psychology and education. In education, cognitive theories highlight the internal workings of each person’s brain, rather than the external workings of teachers and education materials.

Another aspect of cognitivist theories that is particularly relevant to MI is their emphasis on diversity: while all humans share many similarities and everyone is entitled to the same rights and opportunities, all humans are also different based both on their genetic makeup, as well as their unique individual experiences. This diversity, when understood and appreciated, provides a great source of strength.

In the 1980s, Howard Gardner, a proponent of cognitivist perspectives, developed MI theory based on eight criteria for deciding what constitutes an intelligence:

              i.      Potential isolation by brain damage.

            ii.      The existence of idiot savants, prodigies and other exceptional individuals.

          iii.      An identifiable core operation or set of operations.

          iv.      A distinctive development history, along with a definable set of 'end-state' performances.

            v.      An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility.

          vi.      Support from experimental psychological tasks.

        vii.      Support from psychometric findings.

      viii.      Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system.

Other theorists, such as Robert Sternberg, have developed other theories involving a variety of intelligences.

What MI Theory Says

MI is a very optimistic intelligence theory. It states that intelligence is not a unitary construct, that instead there are many ways to be smart. Indeed, everyone is smart, and in different ways. On another optimistic note, Gardner claims that intelligence is not fixed, and that we can all, even adults, become smarter.

Exactly what constitutes an intelligence is a matter of some debate. Nonetheless, it should be understood that ‘intelligence’ is not a synonym for ‘skill’ or ‘ability’.  Intelligences are also about preferences, how people enjoy doing things, what their favourite modes of learning are. Furthermore, intelligences seldom work alone; almost any task involves two or more intelligences.

An MI Survey

One excellent way to understand MI is to take the MI survey found in Armstrong’s book Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom (second edition), 2001, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia, USA. Below is a much-shortened and somewhat modified version of the survey, with three questions for each of the eight intelligences currently identified by Gardner. Answer Yes (1) or No (0) to each of the questions (if you must, you can answer .5).

1. Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence

1. Do you enjoy putting thoughts on paper or in the computer?
2. Do you enjoy playing with words, such as rhymes, puns and word games?
3. Do you enjoy reading books and magazines?

2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence

1. Do you enjoy chess, checkers, or other strategy games?
2. Do you ask questions about how things work?
3. Do you feel more comfortable when something has been measured or quantified in some way?

3. Interpersonal Intelligence

1. Do you enjoy teaching others?
2. Do you enjoy doing things as part of a group?
3. Are you good at seeing the points of view of others?

4. Intrapersonal Intelligence

1. Would you be described as someone who in well-organized and in control of yourself?
2. Do you often set goals and reach them?
3. Do you feel good about who you are?

5. Naturalist Intelligence

1. Are you good at recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, anomalies?
2. Do you enjoy spending time with nature, including animals
3. Do you have keen sensory skills - sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch - and notice things that others often miss? 

6. Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence

1. Can you play a musical instrument?
2. Do you enjoy listening to music?
3. Do you sometimes do things in a rhythmic way?

7. Visual/Spatial Intelligence

1. Do you like maps, charts and diagrams better than words?
2. Do you have a good sense of direction?
3. Do you often doodle and draw?

8. Bodily/Kinaesthetic

1. Are you good at some sports?
2. Do you like working with your hands?
3. Do you enjoy being on the go - running, moving around, walking - instead of sitting or standing still

Two points should be noted when interpreting this survey. First, this is a shortened version of an unvalidated instrument. Another point is that, as can be seen even from this abbreviated survey, each intelligence has many facets. Thus, it would be inaccurate to say someone is high or low in a particular intelligence. For instance, with Bodily/Kinaesthetic Intelligence, someone might enjoy and be good at racquet sports but dislike and be rather poor at sports that demand a great deal of strength, such as weightlifting, or sports that require great accuracy, such as basketball.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Why is this of any import in the current clime? Of late, the most popular theory of human abilities has been the Multiple Intelligence (MI) view of Gardner (1983). The original presentation of the theory of multiple intelligences artfully combined information from a half dozen fields into an engaging set of essays on the initial set of seven intelligences. Each account was liberally illustrated with events from the lives of famous individuals or clinical cases. Indeed, insightful psychobiography seems Gardner’s particular forté.

MI theory has always been more popular with lay readers and practitioners than with either cognitive or differential psychologists. Cognitive psychologists were troubled by the theory’s extreme modularity, particularity the claim that a central working memory was unnecessary (Messick, 1992). Rather, each “intelligence” was seen as having its own working memory. This may sound like a relatively minor point, but it is not. Working memory is a pivotal construct in all models of cognition. Theorists debate how working memory functions, and what sort of modality-specific slave systems it might have. But most do not debate whether it is a useful or needed construct.

Differential psychologists, on the other hand, were troubled by Gardner’s dismissal of 80 years of research on the organization of human abilities (Carroll, 1993; Gustafsson & Undheim, 1996). The reason given is that, as Gardner sees it, evidence for G is provided almost entirely by short-answer multiple choice, paper-and-pencil tests of the sorts of linguistic and logical intelligence that are at best useful for predicting success in the narrow domain of conventionally structured schools (Gardner, 1993, p. 39). Yet even the most cursory examination of human abilities literature shows that every one of these claims at best overstates and at worst is simply false. But there is enough truth to them, and enough dissatisfaction with standardized tests of all sorts that even those who were troubled by the claims were willing to wait and see what sort of evidence would be produced by the new assessment procedures Gardner advocated. They are still waiting.

Lessons learned from performance assessments in other areas of education will probably hold here. We have found that so-called authentic tests have a beneficial effect on the curriculum and can measure aspects of knowledge and skills not tapped by surrogate measures. But we also have discovered that there is vastly more overlap with conventional tests than difference from them, that performance measures are less reliable, more time consuming to administer and score, and vastly more expensive. Most importantly, there is little reason to think that performance assessments show no overlap with each other, and thus support the notion of an independent set of intelligences.

Gardner’s theory appeals to teachers and parents because it reinforces the idea that at root all children are special, and that giftedness is a multidimensional—not undimensional—affair. Surely both of these are noble goals. However the theory also appeals the perverse human tendency to think categorically rather than probabilistically. To see two types or seven types of people in the world is surely an advance over seeing one type. But typologies mislead more than they lead when the underlying structure in the domain is not categorical. Indeed, the critical failure of Gardner’s theory is not just that it fails to acknowledge or explain why abilities are correlated, but why this correlational structure is implies a hierarchy. In other words, it does not explain why some “intelligences” are more intelligent than others.

Nine Multiple Intelligences at a glance

1. Linguistic Intelligence: the capacity to use language to express what's on your mind and to understand other people. Any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or other person for whom language is an important stock in trade has great linguistic intelligence.
2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does; or to manipulate numbers, quantities, and operations, the way a mathematician does.
3. Musical Rhythmic Intelligence: the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them. People who have strong musical intelligence don't just remember music easily, they can't get it out of their minds, it's so omnipresent.
4. Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence: the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body (your hands, your fingers, your arms) to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dancing or acting.
5. Spatial Intelligence: the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind -- the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences.
6. Naturalist Intelligence: the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.
7. Intrapersonal Intelligence: having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward. We are drawn to people who have a good understanding of themselves. They tend to know what they can and can't do, and to know where to go if they need help.
8. Interpersonal Intelligence: the ability to understand other people. It's an ability we all need, but is especially important for teachers, clinicians, salespersons, or politicians -- anybody who deals with other people.
9. Existential Intelligence: the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

— Taken from PBS website

The Research Perspective

Original Edited by Shirley Veenema, Lois Hetland, and Karen Chalfen 

A Brief Overview of the TheoryThe theory of multiple intelligences challenges the traditional view of intelligence as a unitary capacity that can be adequately measured by IQ tests.1 Instead, Howard Gardner defines intelligence as an ability to solve problems or create products that are valued in at least one culture.

Drawing upon finding from evolutionary biology, anthropology, developmental and cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and psychometrics, Gardner uses eight different criteria to judge whether a candidate ability can be counted as an intelligence:

1. Potential of isolation by brain damage;
2. existence of savants, prodigies, and other exceptional individuals;
3. an identifiable core operation or set of operations;
4. support from experimental psychological tasks;
5. support from psychometric findings;
6. a distinctive developmental history with a definable set of expert “end-state” performances;
7. evolutionary plausibility;
8. susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system.

When he introduced the theory in Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner suggested that each individual possesses at least seven such relatively independent mental abilities or intelligences. Core operations are among the eight criteria he uses to evaluate one or another candidate intelligence. According to his definition, a core operation is a basic information processing mechanism—basically, something (like a neural network) in the brain that takes a particular kind if input or information and processes it. Gardner asserted that each intelligence should have one or more core operations. Among the core operations Gardner specifies in Frames of Mind and his other more recent writings on the naturalist

Intelligence	Core Operations
Linguistic	syntax, phonology, semantics, pragmatics
Musical	pitch, rhythm, timbre
Logical-Mathematical	number, categorization, relations
Spatial	accurate mental visualization, mental transformation of images
Bodily-kinesthetic	control of one’s own body, control in handling objects
Interpersonal	awareness of others’ feelings, emotions, goals, motivations
Intrapersonal	awareness of one’s own feelings, emotions, goals, motivations
Naturalist	recognition and classification of objects in the environment2

In a recent article, “Are there additional intelligences?”3 he examines two more candidate intelligences, naturalist and spiritual, but ends up rejecting spiritual—at least for now—because it does not meet the right criteria named earlier. He is still amassing evidence for other suggested intelligences. For example, existential intelligence—manifest in somebody who is concerned with fundamental questions of existence —does not as yet seem to meet all criteria. If decisions about intelligences are to be taken seriously, they must depend upon examination of the available data.4 So at this point one might joke that the existential intelligence is that “half ” in 8-1⁄2 intelligences.

In this theory, the word intelligence is used in two senses. Intelligence can denote a species-specific characteristic; homo sapiens is that species that can exercise these eight intelligences. Intelligence can also denote an individual difference. While all humans possess the right intelligences, each person has his own particular blend or amalgam of the intelligences.

The definitions of the intelligences on the next page, adapted by White and Blythe from the originals presented in Frames of Mind, list occupations, professions, disciplines, areas and directions an intelligence can take.5 But these are by no means the only examples; nor does any of these examples or end states represent the use of any one intelligence. Rather, all brain-unimpaired people possess all the intelligences, which they blend in various ways in the course of creating something that is meaningful or performing a meaningful role or task.


The Spectrum ApproachProject Spectrum, a nine-year research and development project based on the theories of Howard Gardner and David Feldman of Tufts University, is one example of a way to meet this challenge. Described in detail in The Project Spectrum Preschool Assessment Handbook6,this approach emphasizes identifying children’s areas of strength and then using this information as the basis for individualized educational programs. The curricular and assessment materials developed during the course of the project tap a wider range of cognitive and stylistic strengths than typically had been addressed in traditional early childhood education programs. Teachers find that the Spectrum system for identifying individual strengths can supplement their current assessment strategies, helps them expand the range of activities available to students, and opens up new territory for their teaching.

Distinctive features of the Spectrum approach include: blurring the line between curriculum and assessment by assessing children as they play with rich materials; using “intelligence-fair” materials (e.g., having children work with real mechanical objects instead of answering questions about how the objects work); embedding assessments in meaningful, real-world activities; and attending to stylistic as well as cognitive dimensions of performance. Grounding assessment in real-world activities ensures that the areas addressed are likely to be meaningful to the child, the teacher, and the child’s family.7

Blurring the line between curriculum and assessment: Instead of the traditional intelligence test setting, a small room with an unfamiliar test-giver administering timed and standardized instruments, Spectrum assessments involve children in the classroom playing with rich materials. During the course of a treasure hunt, for example, a child might draw logical inferences and generate a rule connecting two sets of data while searching for “treasures” hidden under flags on a game board island. Teachers use observation sheets to record when a student figures out the rule governing where the treasures have been hidden or a pattern that can be used to predict where remaining objects are hidden.

Using “intelligence-fair” materials: Spectrum assessments tap into abilities directly, via the medium of a domain, rather than using language and logic assessment vehicles. One Spectrum activity asks children to sing the song “Happy Birthday.” The performance is then evaluated phrase by phrase, and scored on four measures of rhythm, pitch, and contour patterns. An assembly activity presents objects of increasing mechanical complexity—real gadgets, like a food grinder and small oil pump. Successful completion depends on a range of observational problem-solving skills, like noticing which pieces come off, learning how to reassemble the gadget, and interring relationships based on sensitive observation.

Embedding assessment in meaningful, real-world activities: The Spectrum activities involve the application of skills in a meaningful context. A child’s ability to tell a story, for example, is observed via an activity that provides a concrete but open-ended framework in which children can produce invented tales. After listening to examples of storytelling, children are asked to tell a story using a “storyboard” made from a board or box top outfitted with figures and a setting. Each child’s story shows much about how he or she ties together successive events, or further elaborates on characters, places, or objects.

Attending to stylistic dimensions of performance: Spectrum’s assessment procedures attend to stylistic as well as cognitive dimensions of performance. These dimensions or “working styles” describe a child’s interaction with the tasks and materials from various content areas. They reflect a process dimension of a child’s work or play—indices of affect, motivation, and interaction with materials, as well as more standard stylistic features like tempo of work and orientation toward auditory, visual, or kinesthetic cues.

It is important to note that intelligence is not the same thing as style. Intelligences are keyed to contents in the world; styles are claims about how an individual approached the full array of contents. It is an empirical matter whether styles actually obtain “across the board” or prove to be specific to particular intellectuals contents.

The Multiple Intelligences 

Linguistic Intelligence allows individuals to communicate and make sense of the world through language. Poets exemplify this intelligence in its mature form. Students who enjoy playing with rhymes, who pun, who always have a story to tell, who quickly acquire other languages—including sign language—all exhibit linguistic intelligence.

Logical-Mathematical Intelligence enables individuals to use and appreciate abstract relations. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers all rely on this intelligence. So do the students who “live” baseball statistics or who carefully analyze the components of problems—either personal or school-related— before systematically testing solutions.

Musical Intelligence allows people to create, communicate, and understand meanings made out of sound. While composers and instrumentalists clearly exhibit this intelligence, so the students who seem particularly attracted by the birds singing outside the classroom window or who constantly tap out intricate rhythms on the desk with their pencils.

Spatial Intelligence makes it possible for people to perceive visual or spatial information, to transform this information, and to recreate visual images from memory. Well-developed spatial capacities are needed for the work of architects, sculptors, and engineers. The students who turn first to the graphs, charts, and pictures in their textbook, who like to “web” their ideas before writing a paper, and who fill the blank space around their notes with intricate patterns are also using their spatial intelligence. While usually tied to the visual modality, spatial intelligence can also be exercised to a high level by individuals who are visually impaired.

Bodily-KinestheticIntelligence allows individuals to use all or part of the body to create products or solve problems. Athletes, surgeons, dancers, choreographers, and crafts people all use bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. the capacity is also evident in students who relish gym class and school dances, who prefer to carry out school projects by making models rather than writing reports, and who toss crumbled paper with frequency and accuracy into wastebaskets across the room.

Intrapersonal Intelligence helps individuals to distinguish among their own feelings, to build accurate mental models of themselves, and to draw on these models to make decisions about their lives. Although it is most difficult to assess who has this capacity and to what degree, evidence can be sought in students’ uses of other intelligences—how well they seem to be capitalizing on their strengths, how cognizant they are of their weaknesses, and how thoughtful they are about the decisions and choice they make.

Interpersonal Intelligence enables individuals to recognize and make distinctions about others’ feelings and intentions. Teachers, parents, politicians, psychologists, and salespeople rely on interpersonal intelligence. Students exhibit this intelligence when they thrive on small-group work, when they notice and react to the moods of their friends and classmates, and when they tactfully convince the teacher of their need for extra time to complete the homework assignment.

Naturalist Intelligence allows people to distinguish among, classify, and use features of the environment. Farmers, gardeners, botanists, geologists, florists, and archaeologists all exhibit this intelligence, as do students who can name and describe the features of every make of car around them.


Copyright 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (on behalf of Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education). Used with permission.

1. Gardner, H. (1983/1993). Frames of mind, p. 8-9.
2. Kornhaber, M. (1996). The Parking Lot Press, Volume 1, No. 1. A publications for the MI strand of Project Zero’s Summer Institute, July, 1996. p. 1.
3. Gardner, H. (in press). Are there additional intelligences? The case for naturalist, spiritual, and existential intelligences. To appear in J. Kane (Ed.), Education, information and transformation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4. Garner, H. (in press), p.19.
5. White, N. & Blythe, T. (1992). Multiple intelligences theory: Creating the thoughtful classroom. In A. Costa, J. Bellanca, & R. Fogarty (Eds.), If minds matter: A foreword to the future. Palatine, IL: Skylight Publishing, Inc., p. 128.
6. Krechevsky, M., with contributions from Adams, M., Chen, J., Goldman, J., Hatch, T., Leibowitz, L., Malkus, U. Ramos-Ford, V. Stork, J., Viens J. & Wexler-Sherman, C. (1994). Project Spectrum: preschool assessment handbook. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Project Zero.
7. Krechevsky, M. (1991, February). Project Spectrum: An innovative assessment alternative, Educational Leadership, 48(5), 45.

Vennema, Shirley, Lois Hetland, and Karen Chalfen (eds.). “Multiple Intelligences: The Research Perspective, A Brief Overview of the Theory.” The Project Zero Classroom: Approaches to Thinking and Understanding. Harvard Graduate School of Education and Project Zero. Used with permission. 

A Multiple Intelligences Checklist

Michael Berman is a leading authority on Multiple Intelligences and English Language Teaching. Michael believes that our intelligences can be developed and are not fixed. Michael also believes that we can all improve our learning if we (and our teachers!) know how we learn.  The checklist which follows is taken from Michael’s book A Multiple Intelligences Road To An ELT Classroom and is based in ideas developed by Howard Gardner, the educational psychologist.  Use the checklist to find about more about how you learn best. At the end of the questionnaire you will find some ideas about how to learn based on your Multiple Intelligences profile.

The following Multiple Intelligences Checklist for EFL students is adapted from an article by Mary Ann Christison published in the MEXTESOL (Mexican branch of the American Teachers Of English To Speakers Of Other Languages) Journal. When the original article was published, only seven intelligence types had been identified. More recently, the naturalist intelligence has been added to the list and the checklist has been rewritten to take this into account.

Rank each statement 0, 1, or 2. Write 0 if you disagree with the statement and write 2 if you strongly agree. Write 1 if you are somewhere in between. Then calculate your score for each intelligence type.

Interpersonal Intelligence

a.            ___     I’m often the leader in activities

b.            ___     I enjoy talking to my friends

c.            ___     I often help my friends

d.            ___     My friends often talk to me about their problems

e.            ___     I’ve got a lot of friends

f.             ___     I’m a member of several clubs

___     TOTAL FOR INTERPERSONAL INTELLIGENCE

Intrapersonal Intelligence

a.            ___     I go to the cinema alone

b.            ___     I go to the library alone to study

c.            ___     I can tell you some things I’m good at doing

d.            ___     I like to spend time alone

e.            ___     My friends find some of my actions strange sometimes

f.             ___     I learn from my mistakes

___     TOTAL FOR INTRAPERSONAL INTELLIGENCE

Logical - Mathematical Intelligence

a.            ___     I often do calculations in my head

b.            ___     I like to put things into categories

c.            ___     I'm good at chess and/or draughts

d.            ___     I like to play number games

e.            ___     I love to play around with Computers

f.             ___     I ask lots of questions about how things work

___     TOTAL FOR LOGICO-MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCE

Linguistic Intelligence

a.            ___     I like to read books, magazines and newspapers

b.            ___     I consider myself a good reader

c.            ___     I like to tell jokes and Stories

d.            ___     I can remember people's names easily

e.            ___     I like to recite tongue twisters

f.             ___     I have a good vocabulary in my native language

___     TOTAL FOR LINGUISTIC INTELLIGENCE

Bodily - Kinaesthetic Intelligence

a.    ___           It's hard for me to sit quietly for a long time

b.    ___           It's easy for me to copy exactly what other people do

c.    ___           I'm good at sewing, woodwork, building or mechanics

d.    ___           I'm good at Sports

e.    ___           I enjoy working with my hands - working with clay or

model making, for example

f.     ___           I enjoy physical exercise

___     TOTAL FOR BODILY-KINAESTHETIC  INTELLIGENCE

Spatial Intelligence

a.            ___     I can read maps easily

b.            ___     I enjoy art activities

c.            ___     I can draw well

d.            ___     Videos and slides really help me to learn new Information

e.            ___     I love books with pictures

f.             ___     I enjoy putting puzzles together

___     TOTAL FOR SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE

Musical Intelligence

a.            ___     I can hum the tunes to lots of songs

b.            ___     I’m a good singer

c.            ___     I play a musical instrument or sing in a choir

d.            ___     I can tell when music sounds off-key

e.            ___     I often tap rhythmically on the table or desk

f.             ___     I often sing songs

___     TOTAL FOR MUSICAL INTELLIGENCE

Naturalist Intelligence

a.    ___           I spend a lot of time outdoors

b.    ___           I enjoy listening to the sounds created in the natural world; birdsong, for example

c.    ___           I can identify plant life and animal species

d.    ___           I can distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous; snakes and/or between poisonous and edible mushrooms

e.    ___           I enjoy observing plants and/or collecting rocks

f.     ___           I’ve got green fingers - I keep pot plants at home and

have an interest in gardening, for example

___     TOTAL FOR NATURALIST INTELLIGENCE

NOW READ ON TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN USE YOUR SCORES TO DEVELOP AS A LEARNER.

According to Gardner, your intelligences profile is not fixed, which means that you can develop both your stronger and weaker areas. Knowing your multiple intelligences profile can also help you because you can identify the kinds of learning activities which can help you to learn well.

Interpersonal Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably enjoy working with other people and have a good understanding of how other people are feeling. In class you probably enjoy working in pairs and groups more than working on your own. When learning vocabulary, you will probably benefit from studying with a friend.

Intrapersonal Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably have a very strong sense of self-awareness and enjoy working on your own. In English lessons, your teacher might ask you to work with other students – at times you might want to ask (politely!) if you can work alone by saying “I work better when I study alone, if that ‘s OK!” Writing a private diary in English, may be a good way of developing your writing skills.

Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably have a very logical mind which analyses processes in steps. You like clear, logical grammatical explanations: sometimes we just have to accept that language learning isn’t always logical. To understand grammar, (word order for questions for example), it might help if you analyse how sometimes we add new words (ie do/does/did) to make a question and how on other occasions we change the words order (with the verb to be).

Linguistic Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably love words and learning languages. This is obviously very helpful if you are learning English, but don’t worry if your score in this area is not your best. Many good speakers of English don’t have highly developed linguistic intelligence and your Anglolang teacher will help you find other ways to make learning enjoyable! You may find comparing your language with English an interesting and useful activity to help you learn.

Bodily-Kinaesthetic Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably use your body to express your emotions and you might find sitting still in the same seat quite difficult.

If you scored highly in this area, you might want to improve your vocabulary by working with cut-up slips of paper which you move around to create word partnerships (collocations). You may also find that your learning improves if you try to move at the same time; you could try learning word stress by making a small jump for an unstressed syllable and a big jump for a stressed syllable.

Spatial Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably have good spatial and visual awareness. You may find chess or parking your car in a small parking place easy when others find this really difficult. When you are learning vocabulary, you could try drawing a picture of the word you are learning. Using different colour ink (blue, red, black and green pens for example) will make your notes much more colourful and memorable.

Musical Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, listening to and even playing music are probably important in your life. Try listening to music when you are studying (some people recommend Mozart) and listen to songs in English as a way of accessing the language. You may even want to write your own memorable tune (a jingle) to help you remember some difficult language.

Naturalist Intelligence

If you scored highly in this area, you probably enjoy being outside and nature in general. You are probably also good at classifying and categorising things into groups so when you are learning vocabulary, think of ways of grouping new words in ways which make sense to you.