Eric
Rooney
Period
2
1.
Theories of Intelligence
There
currently is a great debate over what exactly is intelligence. Three leading theorists have developed their
own opinions on what they believe intelligence to be composed of and these
theories differ from one another in a number of ways.
Sternberg
stresses a triarchic theory of intelligence, which proposes the idea that are
three basic kinds of intelligence. The
first kind of intelligence is called componential intelligence and this refers
to the mentall processes emphasized by most theories of intelligence, such as
the ability to learn how to do things or acquire new knowledge and carry out
tasks effectively. The second component
of this triarchic model is experiential intelligence. Experiential intelligence is the ability to
adapt creatively in new situations and to use insight. This type of intelligence refers to an individual’s
ability to decipher the important from the irrelevant, and their ability to
combine new knowledge with formerly known knowledge. The final component of this triarchic theory
is contextual intelligence. Contextual
intelligence is the ability to select contexts in which you can excel, or the
ability to shape the environment to fit your strengths. According to this triarchic theory it is
apparent that Sternberg believes that intelligence encompasses a broad variety
of skills. The componential is basically
a measure of ability, experiential a measure of creativity and contextual is a
measure of practicality. Thus, in
summary Sternberg’s method of measuring intelligence is to examine the
information processing involved in thinking, changes with experience, and
effects in different environments and when such is measured, it will be shown
that high intelligence results from the effective organization of these three
components in altering their use to deal with familiar problems and making
adaptations in order to work with new problems.
Gardner
proposes the theory of multiple intelligences.
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence suggests that there is not one
intelligence, but rather many intelligences, each of which is relatively
independent of the others. Gardner’s
theory suggests that intelligence is made up of seven various components each
of which is independent of the other.
The first of the seven components is logical-mathematical intelligence
and this refers to an individual’s ability to work with numerical values or
logically solve problems. The second
component, linguistic intelligence, refers to an individuals verbal skills and
their ability to manipulate language.
The third component is spatial intelligence and this refers to such
skills as the ability to draw well or other artistic skills that deal with
depicting or visualizing thing from a spatial perspective. Musical intelligence is rather
self-explanatory because it deals with the musical talents of an individual
such as their ability to compose or play instruments. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence refers to the
ability of coordinated movement such as dance performance or athletic
competitions. Interpersonal intelligence
refers to a person’s ability to interact with other individuals. Finally, intrapersonal intelligence refers to
a person’s ability to know themselves.
Thus, it can be seen that the number of intelligences are more extensive
in this theory than in the triarchic theory.
Goleman
has a theory of emotional intelligence.
Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence refers to how effectively
people perceive and understand their own emotions and the emotions of others
and can manage their emotional behavior.
Goleman believes that there are five traits or components that
contribute to one’s emotional intelligence.
The first component is knowing one’s own emotions, and this refers to
the ability to monitor and recognize our own feelings. This concept is of central important to
self-awareness and all other dimensions of emotional intelligence. The second component is managing one’s
emotions. This refers to the ability to
control impulses; to cope effectively with sadness, depression, and minor
setbacks; as well as to control how long emotions last. The third component is the ability to use
emotions to motivate oneself and this refers to the capacity to marshal
emotions toward achieving personal goals.
The fourth component is recognizing the emotions of other people and
this refers to the ability to read subtle, nonverbal cues that reveal what
people really want and need. The final
component is managing relationships and this refers to the ability to
accurately acknowledge and display one’s own emotions as well as being
sensitive to the emotions of concepts.
All
of these theories are unique in their own respect, and furthermore, they all
tend to be different from the past traditional theories of intelligence. The past traditional theories tended to focus
mainly on measuring concrete things such as numerical and verbal skills, but
the more contemporary models discussed above account for the various other
strengths of individuals. For example, a
traditional theory presented by Thurstone stressed seven areas- spatial
ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, verbal meaning, memory, word
fluency, and reasoning. Thurstone’s
theory basically centers around how smart an individual is, and it fails to
take into account the other possible strengths of the individual such as their
musical or artistic talents which are taken into account in the more
contemporary theories. However, it is
important to note that the more contemporary theories are not completely
different from the past traditional theories, rather the contemporary theories
seem to take the past, traditional theories into consideration and then expand
upon them.
2.
I would be in a rather tough situation if I wished to measure the
intelligence of all the students because I obviously would have to account for
cultural bias within the tests, and there would also be a good chance that I
would have to keep my testing techniques within financial guidelines. To the students with US origins, I could
administer a Stanford-Binet test. This
tests was developed with the purpose of measuring IQ and to help identify those
individuals who are not too bright in hope that they can be given better
assistance. One of the main advantages
of this test is the fact that it will help me locate those students who are
struggling and as principal, I would then help get these children the necessary
help. However, I a disadvantage of this
test is the fact that this test is highly verbal in nature. This would be a huge disadvantage in my
situation because some of the students aren’t very familiar with the English
language and thus, they have a disadvantage in testing. Therefore, if I administered this test to the
foreign students they would most likely score poorly on it because they are
unfamiliar with the English language. I
wouldn’t want to obtain a false measurement of my foreign born students due to
an unfair test that is culturally bias so I would make sure that I would
administer performance tests to my students.
Performance tests are tests that attempt to minimize the use of
language, and thus, all students will have an equal opportunity to perform well
on the test despite their language background.
I would also make sure that I administered culture-fair tests, which are
tests that are designed to reduce cultural bias by minimizing skills and values
that vary from one culture to another.
If the tests that I administer aren’t culturally-fair, then the US students
would perform better because they are so accustomed to our everyday values
while the foreign students may not perform as well because they would be
unfamiliar with the norms and traditions of our society.
In
order to obtain an accurate measure of intelligence I may also wish to
administer the WISC-III tests to my students.
The WISC-III tests is an individual intelligence test developed
especially for school-aged children; it yields verbal, performance and full IQ
scores. The fact that this test would
require individual testing may be beneficial because the student can get his or
her necessary attention during the test.
It may also be possible to have a favorable proctor for the foreign
students that could help aid with the language barriers. However, this test does offer a number of
disadvantages as well. First, the test
measures and stresses verbal skills, and if English isn’t the primary language
of the student then there is a good chance that they will perform poorly and
thus, the results will be lower than they should be. This wouldn’t be fair to the foreign born
students, so I would hesitate to administer the WISC-III. One of the other main reasons as to why I probably
wouldn’t administer the WISC-III test has to deal with the fact that it is an
individual test and to administer an individual test to each and everyone of my
students would be very time consuming and financially costly. Thus, from an economical point of view
administering a WISC-III test to the whole school wouldn’t be very practical,
rather I may decide to only administer the WISC-III tests to those students who
have performed poorly on the culture-fair performance tests that I originally
administered. Through further testing
with the WISC-III it may be possible to determine what specific areas the
student needs help with improving.
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