One Intellegence or Several?

Multiple Intelligence by Howard Gardner (1975).



"There is a general consensus that there are different levels of intelligence, and that different individuals have different capacities of intelligence. In other words, "individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought" (Neisser et al., 1996, p. 77). But, how many and what kinds of different types of intelligences exist, and how to define intelligence, is still at debate."

Sited 01/08/12 at;
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/paik.html

The debate on how we can measure an individuals intelligence seems to be ongoing. According to Spearman (1904) an individual has one general intelligence factor or g. That is, a single factor that determines the intelligence of a person. He also referred this to the 'positive manifold' (Spearman, 1904).

Gardner (1975), however, claims that an individual can have 'multiple intelligence'. He suggests that there are 7 different forms of intelligence. They are linguistic, musical, spatical, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal and logicomathematical.

Each theory can be debatable as a persons social and cultural background needs to be accounted for and may affect the results of the tests that prove a persons level of intelligence.

I took the Multiple Intelligence test and was a little surprised at the results. The test results showed am higher in Kinaesthetic (Body Smart), Intrapersonal (Myself Smart) and Interpersonal (People Smart) than Visual (Picture Smart).  But 3 years ago I did this test when I first started this degree and my results were very different. I was higher in Visual/Spatical. This is very interesting to me as it is saying I have changed my levels of intelligence since starting university! Could this be true or just do other factors come into play?

My results from the test.
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/results.cfm


In the context of classroom learning and teaching it is important to recognise that each student will have a different learning style. The benefits of using ICTs in the classroom in that they have the ability to cater for all different styles of learning and intelligence levels (moodle week 1). As teachers we have the ability to design tasks to suit each learner. The 'one size fits all' approach does not cater for different learning styles. Teachers need to be know their learners and how they learn best so they can create learning experiences that students will engage in and achieve outcomes.