INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE
 Language and Labeling
 Exceptional students may have developmental delays, learning




disabilities, communication disorders, emotional or behavioural
disorders, physical disabilities, autism, traumatic brain injury, impaired
hearing, etc.
Caution: labeling students is a controversial issue
Label does not tell which methods to use with individual students, selffulfilling prophecies, a stigma that cannot be changed, mistaken for
explanations.
“special” protects, open doors for special programs, needed
information, or financial assistance.
Both, stigmatize and help students. Until we are able to make
diagnoses with greater accuracy
WHAT DOES INTELLIGENCE MEAN?
 1. The capacity to learn;
 2. The total knowledge a person
has acquired; and
 3. The ability to adapt
successfully to new situations
and to the environment in
general.
 Most agreed: abstract
reasoning, problem solving, and
decision making .
 Disagreed about the structure of
intelligence.
INTELLIGENCE: ONE ABILITY OR MANY?
 Some believe intelligence is a basic ability that affects performance on
all cognitive oriented tasks.
 Charles Spearman suggests there is one factor or mental attribute, g
general intelligence, that is used to perform any mental test, but that
test also requires some specific abilities in addition to g.
 Spearman assumed that individuals vary in both general intelligence
and specific abilities, and that together these factors determine
performance on mental tasks.
MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
 GUILFORD suggests three
basic categories, or faces of
intellect: mental operations, or
the processes of thinking;
contents, or what we think
about; and products, or the end
results of our thinking.
 1. Mental operations are
divided into six subcategories:
cognition, convergent thinking,
divergent thinking, evaluation,
 immediate memory,and
memory overtime
 2. The contents on which
people operate are divided into
five subcategories:visual
content, auditory content, word
meanings, symbols, and
behaviours.
 3. The different Products that
may result are units, classes,
relations, systems,
transformation, and
implications.
HOWARD GARDNER: MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
 THREE separate kinds of
intelligence: linguistic (verbal),
musical, spatial, logicalmathematical, bodily
kinesthetic, understanding of
others (interpersonal), and
understanding of self
(intrapersonal).
 Individuals often excel in one
of these areas but have no
remarkable abilities in the other
six.
 There may be more kinds of
intelligence - seven is not a
magic number.
ROBERT STERNBERG’S
TRIARCHIC THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE
ANALYTIC, CREATIVE, AND PRACTICAL.
 1. Analytic intelligence involves
 a. Metacomponents Higher-
mental processes of the
individual that leads to more or
less intelligent behaviour  Components - elementary
information processes that are
classified by the functions they
serve and how general they are.
At least three functions they
serve.
order planning, strategy
selection, and monitoring is
performed by this.
 b. Performance components
executing the strategies
selected.
 c. Knowledge-acquisition
components gaining new
knowledge, such as separating
relevant from relevant
information as you try to
understand a new concept
CREATIVITY
The second part of Sternberg’s Triarchic theory
 Involves coping with new
experiences. Intelligent
behaviour is marked by two
characteristics:
 1. Insight, or the ability to deal
effectively with novel
situations, and
 2. Automaticity - or the ability
to become efficient and
automatic in thinking and
problem solving.
 Involves solving new problems
that can be applied without
much cognitive effort.
PRATICAL INTELLIGENCE
The third part of Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory
  Highlights the importance of choosing an environment in which a
person can succeed, adapting to that environment, and reshaping it if
necessary.
 Abilities that make a person successful in a rural farm community may
be useless in the inner city.
 Intelligence in this sense involves practical matters such as career
choice or social skills.
HOW IS INTELLIGENCE MEAUSRED?
 Intelligence, as measured by
standard tests, is related to
learning in school? Why is this
so? It has to do in part with the
way intelligence tests were first
developed.
INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT (IQ)
Alfred Binet
 Mental age. In intelligence testing, a score based on average abilities
for that age group. A child who succeeded on the items passed by most
six-year-olds, for example, was considered to have a mental age of six.
 The concept of IQ was added after Binet’s test was brought to the US
and revised at Stanford University  Stanford-Binet test.
 IQ= mental age
X 100
 Chronological age
 Deviation IQ is a number that tells exactly how much above or
below average a person scored on the test, compared to others in
the same age group.
GROUP versus INDIVIDUAL TESTS
 Stanford-Binet is an individual
intelligence test.
 Group test can be given to
whole classes or schools.
 Group test is much less likely to
yield an accurate picture of any
person’s abilities
 As a teacher, you should be
very wary of IQ scores based
on group tests.
WHAT DOES AN IQ SCORE MEAN?
 Intelligence and achievement
 Intelligence test scores predict
achievement in schools quite
well, at least for large groups.
 But do people who score high
on IQ tests achieve more in
life? Here the answer is less
clear.
 Factors like motivation, social
skills, and luck may make a
difference.
INTELLIGENCE
Nature - versus - nurture
 Most believe that differences in intelligence are due to both heredity
and environment, probably in about equal proportions for children.
 “Genes do not fix behaviour. Rather they establish a range of possible
reactions to the range of possible experiences that the environment can
provide”
 And environmental influences include everything from the health of a
child’s mother during pregnancy to the amount of lead in the child’s
home to the quality of teaching the child receives.
 Cognitive skills, like any other skills, are always improvable.
Intelligence is a current state of affairs, affected by past experiences
and open to future changes. Even if I. Is a limited potential, the
potential is still quite large, and a challenge to all teachers.
ABILITY DIFFERENCES AND TEACHING
Between-Class A. Grouping and Within-Class A. Grouping
 Between-Class A. G or




tracking. when whole class are
formed based on ability .
Segregation by ability may
benefit high-ability students
slightly, but it often causes
problems for low-ability
students.
L.a. classes seem to receive
lower-quality instruction.
Student self-esteem suffers.
Can have a long-term
implications
 Within-class A.G..Clustering
students by ability within the
same class.
 Many elementary-school
classes are grouped for reading,
and some are grouped for math.
If you use Homogeneous small
groups in your class the
guidelines should make the
approach more effective.
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
 Students with moderate to
severe developmental delays
have significant limitations in
cognitive abilities and adaptive
behaviours
 Learn at a far slower rate. Have
difficulties maintaining skills
without ongoing practice, and
generalizing skills learned in
one context to another.
 Difficulties carrying out tasks
that involve combining or
integrating multiple skills
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES (cont.)
 IQ below 70 to 75 is one
indicator of a developmental
delay, but it is not enough
evidence to diagnose a child as
having a developmental
disability
 There must also be problems
with adaptive behaviour, dayto-day and social functioning.
 Caution: when interpreting the
scores of children from
different cultures
 Two principles to which to base
instruction for students with
D.D.: a functional curriculum
and a community-based
education
 A functional curriculum means
setting goals and targeting skills
that will help students succeed
in life outside of school.
 Relating what is learned in
school to community contexts.
Read guidelines for teaching.
GIFTED AND TALENTED
 No agreement about what
constitutes as gifted student.
Can have many different gifts.
 Guilford claims there are 180.
 Renzulli and Reis (91):
giftedness as a combination of
three characteristics: aboveaverage general ability, a high
level of creativity, and a level of
task commitment or motivation
achieve certain areas

WHAT PROBLEMS DO THE GIFTED FACED?
 Boredom and frustration in
 Recognizing students’ special
school as well as social
isolation 9sometimes even
ridicule) from peers.
 Focused on issues or totally
absorbed in computers, drama,
or geology.
 Difficult to accept their own
emotions, because the mismatch
between mind and emotion can
be great.
 May be impatient with friends,
parents, and even teachers who
do not share their interests or
abilities.
abilities. How do you separate
gifted students from
hardworking or parentally
pressured students?
 Some very able students
deliberately earn lower grades,
making their abilities even
harder to recognize.
 Seven questions are good
guides to pick out gifted
children in your class
TEACHING GIFTED CHILDREN
 Teaching methods for gifted
children should encourage
abstract thinking (formaloperational thought), creativity,
and independence, not just the
learning of greater quantity of
facts.
 Teachers must be imaginative,
flexible, and unthreatened by
the capabilities of these students
 What does this child need
most?
 What is she or he ready to
learn?
 Who can help me to challenge
them?
CREATIVITY
CREATIVITY AND COGNITITON
 Gardner defines “a person
 To be creative, the “invention”
who regularly solves problems,
fashions products, or defines
new questions in a domain in a
way that is initially considered
novel but that ultimately
becomes accepted in a
particular setting”
 This conception suggests that
there is no such thing as “all
purpose creativity”; people are
creative in a particular area
must be intended.
 Creativity and Cognition
having a rich store of
knowledge in an area is the
basis for creativity, but
something more is needed. The
ability to break set restructuring the problem to see
thing in a new way, which leads
to a sudden insights.
ASSESSING CREATIVITY
 Requires extensive knowledge, flexibility, and the continual






reorganizing of ideas
Motivation and persistence play important roles in the creative process.
Equate creativity with divergent thinking .
Divergent thinking is the ability to propose many different ideas or
answers
Foster and encourage creativity
can try brainstorming.
Separate the process of creating ideas from the process of evaluating
them because evaluation often inhibits creativity.
LEARNING STYLES
 Individuals differ in how they
approach a task, variations have
to do with “characteristic modes
of perceiving, remembering,
thinking, problem solving, and
decision making, reflective of
information-processing
regularities that develop …
around underlying personality
trends.
 Field dependent people tend to
perceive a pattern as a whole,
not separating one element from
the total visual field.
 Difficulty focusing on one
aspect of a situation, picking
out important details, analyzing
a pattern into different parts or
monitoring their use of
strategies to solve problems
FIELD-DEPENDENCE & FIELD-INDEPENDENCE
 F-D.work well in groups, have
 Not attuned to social
a good memory for social
formation, and prefer subjects
such as literature and history
 Field-independent people
monitor their own information
processing, perceive separate
parts of a total patterns and able
to analyze a pattern according
to its components.
relationships, do well in math
and science where their
analytical abilities pay off.
 Should be aware that students
approach problems in different
ways.
 Some may need help learning to
pick out important features and
to ignore irrelevant details.
They may seem lost in less
structured situations and need
clear, step-by-step instructions.
IMPULSIVE & REFLECTIVE COGNITIVE STYLES
 Impulsive students work very
quickly but make many
mistakes.
 Reflective students work slowly
and make few errors
 As with F-Dep/F-Indep.,
imp/ref. Cognitive styles are not
related to intelligence within the
normal range.
 Students can learn to be
reflective, if they are taught
specific strategies
 Learning styles and
preferences.
 Learning styles are approached
to learning and studying:
 Deep and surface approaches
to processing information in
learning situations.
DEEP PROCESSING & SURFACE PROCESSING
LEARNING PREFERENCES
 Deep-processing App. To
 Surface-processing App. Focus
learning see the learning
materials or activities as a
means for understanding some
underlying concepts or
meanings.
 Less concern about how their
performance is evaluated,
motivation plays a role.
on memorizing the learning
material.
 Motivated by rewards, grades,
external standards, and
 the desire to be evaluated
positively by others.
LEARNING PREFERENCES
 Preferences for particular
learning environemnts