MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES: THEORY AND APPLICATION
This paper is a study of one of the most striking challenges to the traditional scientific view of what constitutes human intelligence and how it can be objectively measured, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner's MI theory has been gaining prominence through its successful application in a number of experimental educational projects, positing it as does the idea that intelligence is not a single "way of being smart," but instead includes a range of seven distinct groups of skills, talents, and ways of dealing with the world. By finding methods of developing and measuring each separate type of intelligence, Gardner believes that schools can produce more completely realized individuals and encourage students to develop their fullest possible potential. His ideas have not yet been widely accepted in American education, but they offer a breathtakingly new way of looking at how schools can improve the work they do.
The concept of measuring human intelligence along a consistently applied scale is a distinctly twentieth century idea. French psychologist Alfred Binet devised the first widely used test of intelligence in 1905 which the scientific community as a whole came very quickly to accept while refining and adding to the specific methodology for such testing. One of Binet's disciples, the English scientist Charles Spearman, contributed a key concept to the discussion with his proposal that the diverse functions of intelligence should be able to be reduced to a single common factor. Much of the scientific activity in the field since then has been obsessed with isolating that common factor and determining a way to objectively measure it.
Particularly in the last two decades, however, a number of psychologists have begun to seriously challenge this notion through intensive study of how children learn, how teachers evaluate learning, and even what the ...