Application and Effectiveness of Gardeners Intelligences in the Classroom
The modern day application of multiple intelligences (MI) in the classrooms goes back to 1904 when Alfred Binet began to investigate and predict which students were at risk of failing in the classroom. Binet’s work asked the right questions, but his answers hurt more than helped students whose intelligences did not coincide with the intelligences being taught to in schools across Europe and the US. His thought that intelligence could be measured by a single text that yielded an objective numerical score (The IQ Test) came at no help to students who struggled to learn at the same frequencies as their better preforming and tuned in peers (Armstrong, 2009).
Relief came for struggling students came 80 years later when Howard Garden’s research shifted our the model for understanding intelligence away from Binet’s rigid model to a more flexible one that took into account multiple intelligences.
According to Gardener, intelligence is “The capacity to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in one ore more cultural settings” (Gardner & Hatch, 1989). Gardener originally saw seven distinct categories of intelligence that fit within this definition and only recently added an eight. They are: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical spatial intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist.
Binet overly accounted for aptitude in logical-mathematical and special intelligences as indicated overall intelligences and classrooms pandered to a certain type of student. According to Thomas Armstrong book on MI, Gardener was accustomed to hearing expressions such as “He’s not very intelligent, but he has a wonderful aptitude for music” and very consciously used the word intelligence to describe each category instead of talents or aptitudes (Armstrong, 2009).
Educator Bruce Campbell in his essay “Multiple Intelligences In The Classroom” recounts an experience in his classroom where he organized a third grade classroom into seven learning centers each dedicated to one of the intelligences. Students instead of learning the lesson in the way that most appeals to them, are taught the same lesson in seven different learning centers. In the 1989-1990 school year his classroom was part of a research product to assess the effects of multimodal learning. The research revealed improvements across the board, including a decrease in student discipline problems. The data showed, among other indicators that students developed “Increased responsibility, self direction, independence. . . cooperative learning skills.” Overall, the most important indicator, standardized test scores went up (Campbell, 1996).
Ineffective uses come from either a misunderstanding of the theory, or an improper application of it. Some school districts lack resources to create academic settings in which Gardner’s theories are actually applied (Armstrong, 2009). The central Tenet of Gardner’s work is “teach in a way that students can learn.” The realities though are pools school districts where it is difficult to find teachers with the training to implement Gardener's models. It is one thing to have top down implementation as part of educational reform and another to have teachers trained to implement those reforms effectively in their classrooms.
References:
Armstrong, T. (2009). Multiple intelligences in the classroom. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Campbell, B. (n.d.). Multiple Intelligences In The Classroom. Context Institute: Whole- system pathways to a thriving future. Retrieved September 3, 2013, from http://www.context.org/iclib/ic27/campbell/
