Multiple intelligence training and its impact on students' core intelligence and learning Paperback - 1983

From the publisher

INTRODUCTION "Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." Plato Sitting and listening to someone for a whole long day is quite difficult, boring and exhausting for any person. This is especially true in the case of the students who sit in the classroom day after another listening to their teachers in various subjects and languages, except for a few who are most inclined towards reading and writing and calculations and enjoy the same. Many students undergo severe stress due to frequent assessments and the harassment they have to face due to their low test results. This results in frequent school drop outs, especially in schools in the rural areas. Too many of our brightest and most capable students are sometimes caught in a system that places too much emphasis on linguistic, word smart intelligence or mathematical, number smart intelligence. Students at all levels of academic readiness- -from developmental to honours--are affected by the rigidity of this way of thinking. Focusing solely on these types of learning strategies has in some cases encouraged rote memory teaching strategies that may foster little or no connection to material, low motivation, and poor performance (Lefebvre, 2004). 2 Each child is different and has his or her own different ways to learn and understand various things. If the classes are delivered and made to be learned in such a way that all these ?different ways' are addressed while teaching each subject, the classes will be enjoyable to all the students. It will no longer be a burdensome task. The present study is an endeavour to change this scenario. An attempt is made to meet the learning needs of all the students in the classroom and to help them learn better. This is done on the basis of the theory of Multiple Intelligences of a Harvard psychologist named Howard Gardner. He proposed the existence of at least seven basic Intelligences and recently added an eighth (Gardner, 1999). Gardner sought to broaden the scope of human potential beyond the confines of the IQ score (Armstrong, 2009). Intelligence The idea that intelligence could be objectively measured and reported by a single score took hold. Nearly a century later myriad standardized tests are available for a variety of purposes, and they all are based on Binet's premise that a single test can yield a score that captures all of an individual's abilities and potential (Hoerr, 2000). The items in an IQ test measure only a limited set of human talents, including verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, visual thinking and logical problem solving. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, version III (WAIS-III) is an expanded version that produces a measure called 'g', or 'general intelligence'. It assesses 13 mental faculties such as arithmetic, sequencing, vocabulary and processing speed, but still has limitations. All of this is based on an arbitrary and restricted set of criteria (Fleetham, 2006),