Pregnancy
Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom
The Foundations of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences
By Thomas Armstrong
In 1904, the minister of public instruction in Paris asked the French psychologist Alfred Binet and a group of colleagues to develop a means of determining which primary grade students were "at risk" for failure so these students could receive remedial attention. Out of their efforts came the first intelligence tests. Imported to the United States several years later, intelligence testing became widespread, as did the notion that there was something called "intelligence" that could be objectively measured and reduced to a single number or "IQ" score.
Almost eighty years after the first intelligence tests were developed, a Harvard psychologist named Howard Gardner challenged this commonly held belief. Saying that our culture had defined intelligence too narrowly, he proposed in the book Frames of Mind (Gardner 1983) the existence of at least seven basic intelligences. In his theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory), Gardner sought to broaden the scope of human potential beyond the confines of the IQ score and suggested that intelligence has more to do with the capacity for (1) solving problems and (2) fashioning products in a context-rich and naturalistic setting.
More on: Developing Gifts and Talents
