What Should We Ask About Intelligence?
Robert J. Sternberg
from The American Scholar, Spring 1996
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1.
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Alice
was the admissions officer's dream. She had 800s on her
boards, close to 4.0 average, and glowing letters of
recommendation from her teachers. She was accepted by every
graduate program to which she applied. We were thrilled when she
decided to matriculate at Yale's doctoral program of psychology.
2. The tests and other predictors of success were correct as far as
they went: Alice excelled in her first year of course work,
competing with just one other student for the highest academic
average in an already highly selective program. Then something
went wrong – something big. By the time Alice was done with the
program, she was roughly in the bottom 20 percent of her cohort.
And she was highly motivated to succeed.
3. What went wrong with Alice is what has gone wrong with
thousands and thousands of students: they are brilliant when it
comes to remembering and even analyzing ideas, but they are dim
when it comes to generating their own ideas. They may have 700s
or even 800s on their boards, and often IQs of 140s and above,
but they seem to lack even an ounce of creativity. In other terms,
they are analytically, but not creatively, intelligent.
4. Contrast the fate of Alice to that of Barbara. Barbara applied to
Yale's graduate program in psychology with good but not
outstanding grades. More notable were her superb letters of
recommendation from eminent people and her record of published
work. The impressive creativity of this work was apparent to
almost anyone who took the trouble to read it. But Barbara's test
scores, although not awful, were modest. Barbara, unlike Alice,
was rejected.
5. Barbara was one of the lucky ones. I hired her as a research
associate. She demonstrated exceptional creative abilities, and two
years later, when she reapplied to our graduate program, she was
admitted as the top pick. But for every Barbara who gets a chance,
there are unknown thousands like her who are consigned to the
academic waste-basket – they never get the chance that Barbara
got.
6. Paul might have seemed like the ideal admission's candidate. He
combined Alice's analytical ability with Barbara's creative ability.
His professors were delighted with him and expected him to be a
smash hit on the academic job market. When Paul went to the
academic job market, he was asked to interview at every
institution to which he applied – an enviable record. His hit rate for
getting jobs wasn't quite so enviable, however: he was offered only
one position, at the weakest department to which he applied.
Clearly, he was far from a desirable commodity, his analytical and
creative abilities notwithstanding.
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7. Ironically, Sam, who had received no interview offers at all in the
first round, was later offered many of the interview opportunities
Paul had initially flubbed. Sam was offered several positions and
within a few years had tenure, whereas Paul was out of a job.
Sam's work was nothing special, but he knew what his department
valued, and he delivered.
8. What went wrong with Paul was straightforward: Paul was so
lacking in common sense that he couldn't hide his arrogance even
on the one day he needed to hide it – the day on which he had a
job interview. And once hired, his arrogance led him quickly to
become a pariah among his colleagues. Paul was analytically and
creatively intelligent but lacking in practical intelligence. Sam,
more modest in analytical and creative intelligence, was able to
translate his practical intelligence into good, although perhaps not
distinguished, career success.
9. The stories of Alice and Barbara and of Paul and Sam are all true,
with only the names changed. They are also, in their themes,
common stories in academe. But stories like these are what have
led many psychologists, myself among them, to conclude, that
conventional notions of intelligence may be correct as far as they
go but that they do not go far enough. These psychologists have
suggested that conventional notions of intelligence (a) define
intelligence too restrictively and (b) often provide reasonable
answers, but too narrow questions. The problem is that the
answers may be fine, but the questions are not.
10. Today, the field of intelligence is going through a heated battle
between adherents to a conventional paradigm that has its roots at
the turn of the century and adherents to new paradigms that are
attempting to turn the old paradigm on its head. And today,
research as well as theory in the field of intelligence more and
more is reflecting the revolutionary paradigms.
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What kinds of abilities do the revolutionary theories of intelligence
compass? One such theory, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple
intelligences, comprises seven abilities, which Gardner believes are
distinct and relatively independent intelligences: (a) linguistic
intelligence, used in reading a novel, writing a poem or an article
such as this one, or generating an extemporaneous talk; (b) logical
mathematical intelligence, used in solving mathematical problems,
proving logical theorems, or completing categorical or other forms
of syllogisms; (c) spatial intelligence, used in finding one's way in
unfamiliar terrain, figuring out how to fit suitcases into the trunk of
a car, or figuring out where in the playing field a baseball's batter's
fly ball will land; (d) musical intelligence, used in remembering a
tune, singing a song, or composing a sonata; (e) bodily-kinesthetic
intelligence, used in dancing ballet, performing gymnastics, or
playing tennis; (f) interpersonal intelligence, used in figuring out
what other people mean from what they say, decoding what their
facial expressions communicate, or deciding what is appropriate to
say in an interaction with a superior; and (g) intrapersonal
intelligence, understanding why one takes rejection so poorly, why
one tends to be overconfident in certain instances, or why one has
failed in achieving an important personal goal.
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12. Another such theory, my own triarchic theory of human
intelligence, follows from observations such as those of Alice,
Barbara, Paul, and Sam, as described earlier in the article. This
theory holds that intelligence has three major aspects: analytical,
creative and practical. Conventional good test takers and good
students tend to excel in analytical intelligence but not necessarily
in the creative and practical aspects of intelligence.
13. An implication of this theory is that the reason conventional
intelligence tests predict school achievement as well as they do is
that schools, like conventional tests, tend to emphasize analytical
skills far more than they emphasize creative and practical skills.
Indeed, the latter kinds of skills may even be punished, as when
students who depart from a teacher's expectations or point of view
find themselves graded down for having done so.
14.
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But
if tests predict academic performance fairly well, why do we
need revolutionary conceptions of intelligence, or, indeed, any new
conceptions at all? After all, the tests are doing fairly well what
they were designed to do. Why not leave well enough alone?
15. In one study, a colleague and I sought to address the question of
just what the tests predict by validating the Graduate Record
Examination (GRE) as a predictor of various kinds of performance
in our own graduate program in psychology at Yale. Together with
Wendy Williams, I asked professors to rate all their primary
advisees who were in the psychology doctoral program between
1980 and 1991. Forty professors provided ratings on a 1 (low) to 7
(high) scale of 167 graduate students (68 males, 99 females) on
five scales: (a) analytical abilities, (b) creative abilities, (c)
practical abilities, (d) research abilities, and (f) teaching abilities.
Means of these ratings did not differ significantly between the
sexes.
16. We also had available students' scores on the GRE verbal,
quantitative, and analytical sections, and on the advances test (for
73 of the students, because this test is optional). We further
obtained the students' GPAs during their first and second years of
graduate training.
17. We found that the GRE provided some prediction of first-year
grades (correlations of 0.18 for the verbal section, 0.14 for the
quantitative section, 0.17 for the analytical section, and most
impressively, 0.37 for the advanced test). All of the correlations
were statistically significant except that for the quantitative score.
Thus, overall, the best predictor of future achievement was,
perhaps not surprisingly, past achievement. But the GRE did not
predict second-year grades.
18. The only consistent predictor of any of the more important
measures of graduate performance (i.e., ratings of analytical,
creative, practical, research, and teaching abilities, as well as of
dissertation quality) was the GRE analytical section, and this
prediction was for men only. Five of six correlations for this section
were statistically significant for men, with a median correlation of
0.30, whereas none of the correlations were statistically significant
for women, with a median correlation of 0.02. Thus, of eight sets
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of correlations (four GRE scores for each of the two sexes), only
one set provided statistically significant results.
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19. The message of the GRE study is largely negative: for the most
part, a conventional test of intellectual abilities did not provide
much prediction of interesting aspects of academic performance.
There was some prediction, but it was only of first-year grades,
and beyond that, the prediction was for men only, and only for the
analytical test. Would we stand to gain anything by a broader
theory and broader tests of intelligence?
20.
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Another
study I was involved with, conducted over a five-year
period in collaboration with Michel Ferrari, Pamela Clinkenbeard,
and Elena Grigorenko, addressed this question. We sought to learn
whether prediction of academic performance at the college level
would improve if we used broader tests; more important, though,
we asked whether students would perform better if they were
taught and their achievement assessed in ways that reflected their
patterns of abilities.
21. We invited high schools from around the country and abroad to
nominate students for a summer college-level psychology course to
be taught at Yale University. Nominated students were then
encouraged to take a test of intelligence based on the triarchic
theory of human intelligence. The test measured not only the
analytical abilities assessed by conventional IQ tests, but also
creative and practical abilities. It measured these abilities in the
verbal, quantitative, and figural (geometric) domains, using both
multiple-choice and essay test items.
22. Eventually, 199 students became part of the program in the
summer of 1993. The program was simultaneously a course and an
experiment. Students were selected to fit into one of five
categories: high (both with respect to other students and with
respect to themselves) in analytical abilities only, similarly high in
creative abilities only, similarly high in practical abilities only,
relatively high in all three abilities, or relatively low in all three
abilities.
23. Students who enrolled were then assigned at random to one of
four types of course, identified by the type of instruction and skills
emphasized: one type of section emphasized memory skills (the
control condition), requiring students to recall and recognize; a
second type emphasized analytical-thinking skills, requiring
students to analyze, judge, compare and contrast, and evaluate; a
third type emphasized creative-thinking skills, requiring students to
generate, invent, create, imagine, and suppose; and a fourth type
emphasized practical thinking skills, requiring students to use,
implement, and apply concepts in their everyday lives. These
sections, with their varied kinds of instruction, met in the afternoon
and represented one component of the course. The basic
instructional content, the text and the morning lectures, were the
same for all four types of course.
24. Ideally, a single course would emphasize all four types of skills, so
that students could learn both to capitalize on their strengths and
to compensate for and correct their weaknesses. But part of our
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purpose in the study was explicitly to look at the effects of
matching versus mismatching of abilities to instruction, and thus
the instructional conditions were somewhat "purified" for purposes
of the experiment.
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25. All students were evaluated for memory as well as for analytical,
creative, and practical achievements. What did we find?
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26. First, with regard to our ability tests, the overall correlations
between sections (analytical, creative, and practical) were low
although statistically significant: 0.23 between the analytical and
creative tests, 0.14 between the analytical and practical tests, and
0.15 between the creative and practical tests. Moreover, a factor
analysis of the subtests revealed no general factor across all the
subtests, but rather specific factors for these various subtests. In
other words, the results tended to support the notion that the
general factor typically obtained in conventional intelligence tests
reflects, in part, the narrow scope of the tests. As the experience
of many teachers suggests, students can be strong in some skills
but weak in others.
27. Second, regardless of the measure of achievement (homework
assignments, multiple-choice and essay examinations, independent
projects) we used, at least two and in one case three of the kinds
of abilities (analytical, creative, practical) significantly and
substantially contributed to the prediction of course performance.
At least one of these abilities was always analytical ability, as
perhaps befits the traditional emphasis of our instruction. But the
key point was that prediction of academic achievement was
improved by adding the other abilities into the prediction equation.
28. Third, and most important, a number of different data analyses
showed that students performed better when the kind of
instruction they received was matched rather than mismatched to
their pattern of abilities. In other words, students achieved at
higher levels when they were taught in a way that recognized and
encouraged their particular pattern of skills. If we teach and assess
in ways that benefit primarily analytical students, we may indeed
end up recognizing only these students as "smart." But if we teach
and assess more broadly, we may be surprised to discover that
many students are considerably more intelligent than we might
have expected.
29.
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The
failure to recognize these students' abilities may have quite
serious implications for their careers. We have created a system of
tests that values certain kinds of abilities, but not others. It is
scarcely surprising that our society has formed what intelligence
researchers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and others
refer to as a "cognitive elite': in order to gain access to competitive
colleges, as well as to competitive graduate programs, one has to
test well. Students with lower test scores are often, and in many
institutions, routinely, denied entrance to the access routes that
would allow them to become distinguished doctors, lawyers,
academics, executives, and so forth. The so-called cognitive elite is
no fact of nature: it is something we have created, much as other
societies (and our own in the past) have created elites based on
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the social class of one's birth. Moreover, it is based on a very
limited kind of cognitive ability.
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30. But would the students denied the access routes to desirable
occupations and economic success actually succeed in the
occupations that are made so hard for them to enter? At one level,
we cannot answer this question, because we never do find out
what might have been. But at another level it seems self-evident
that abilities other than analytical ones are key in the occupations
that our society values.
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31. Consider, for example, the sciences. To get high grades at the high
school and often college level, students need primarily to
memorize textbooks and lectures, and, sometimes, to solve
problem sets at the backs of chapters and on tests. But how similar
are those tasks to the tasks confronted by scientists? Hardly
similar at all. As Harriet Zuckerman has pointed out, eminent
scientists are those who have good taste in the problems they
study - ones who ask good questions. They are the ones who
design broad, elegant, and usually empirically testable theories, or
who design powerful experiments to test such theories. Excellent
novelists as well as literary scholars also need to be creative,
whether in the writing of novels, in the generation of literary
theories, or in coming up with novel interpretations of authors'
ideas. Indeed, outstanding experts in any field need to combine
creative with analytical abilities.
32. Scholars as well as others also need the practical abilities to be
able to communicate their work effectively and to be able to
persuade people that their work is worthy of attention. Academics
often tend to dismiss practical abilities at the same time that they
know that such abilities are key to getting articles accepted by
journals, grant proposals funded by government agencies, students
to pay attention in classes, and the like.
33. In a series of collaborations with Richard Wagner, Wendy Williams,
Joseph Horvath, and George Forsythe, I have found that practical
abilities among adults show virtually no correlation with IQ-like,
analytical abilities across a variety of domains. Although scores on
tests of practical intelligence such as this one do not correlate with
conventional ability measures, they do predict various criteria of
job success. This prediction is over and above that obtained from
IQ tests.
34. The prediction is not only for academics. In a study of business
executives conducted at the Center for Creative Leadership,
Wagner and I found that the best predictor of performance on two
managerial simulations was our own test of practical intelligence,
followed by a conventional intelligence test, and then various
personality measures. In a study of sales people, our test, but not
a conventional intelligence test, predicted various measures of
sales performance.
35. Work suggesting a separation of the more "academic" aspects of
intelligence, as measured by conventional intelligence tests, and
more practical aspects of intelligence is not limited to my own
group at Yale. It is widespread and growing. For example, Steve
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Ceci at Cornell has found that men who consistently picked winners
at a racetrack were generally of average IQ and that there was no
correlation between their IQ and their ability to pick winners. Jean
Lave at Berkeley found that housewives who could easily
distinguish which of two products was a better buy had great
difficulty on a paper-and-pencil test of mathematical operations.
And Terezhina Nunes, now at the Institute of Education in London,
found that Brazilian street children who were failing math in school
could nevertheless do the mathematics to keep a successful street
business thriving.
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36.
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The message of these and similar studies is not that conventional
views of intelligence are wrong but rather that they are highly
incomplete. They deal only with a sliver of what revolutionary
scientists now believe intelligence to comprise. Thus, when the
traditionalists discuss what we know about intelligence, they are
really discussing, from the revolutionary point of view, only a
narrow part of intelligence. They are answering questions, perhaps,
about IQ more than about intelligence, broadly conceived.
37. There is a revolutionary war going on, as there often tends to be in
fields where the excitement is the greatest. The war has not yet
been won by either side. Moreover, it is not, strictly speaking, a
war with only two sides. The revolutionaries have divisions among
themselves. For example, I do not accept all of the assertions of
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, nor does Gardner accept
all of the assertions of my triarchic theory. But we and other
revolutionaries are united by our belief that IQ represents too
narrow a conception of intelligence. We are also united in the view
that intelligence can be modified and have done research
supporting this view.
38. The traditionalists are holding strong in what they see as a solid
fort that has withstood vigorous attacks. The revolutionaries, in
contrast, see gaping and ever-expanding holes on all sides of this
fort. As always, one set of data can lend itself to varied
interpretations. Ultimately, perhaps, all parties to the battle will
lose, as even newer and more appealing theories and tests of
these theories come to the fore. But at the end of the day, that's
what intellectual battles are about - the never-ending search for
understanding, whether of intelligence or anything else.
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Bar Ilan University
A. Ben-Hillel
What Should We Ask about Intelligence?
Pre-reading
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EFL Department
August 2009
You are on the admissions board of Yale University in the Department of
Psychology and Education. There is only one place open in the graduate
program. You and your colleagues are trying to decide which of the following
four students should get that place. Whom do you choose?
Alice has been accepted to every program at every university she has applied to. As
an undergraduate, she had a straight-A average (in Israel, the equivalent to an
average of 90-100), and near-perfect test scores.
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What are the advantages of choosing Alice?
What could be some of the disadvantages?
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Barbara had good, but not outstanding, grades as an undergraduate (approximately
an 80-85 average). She has superb letters of recommendation from well-known
scholars in the field and has already published papers in professional journals. Her
test scores, however, are modest.
What are the advantages of choosing Barbara?
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What could be some of the disadvantages?
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Paul is both imaginative like Barbara and has strong analytical abilities like Alice. In
other words, he offers the best of both worlds. However, he is arrogant and difficult to
be around.
What are the advantages of choosing Paul?
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What could be some of the disadvantages?
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Sam has neither Barbara’s creativity nor the analytical intelligence of Alice. However,
Sam has excellent practical intelligence which enables him to produce work that is
needed and valued in his field.
What are the advantages of choosing Sam?
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What could be some of the disadvantages?
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Bar Ilan University
A. Ben-Hillel
EFL Department
August 2009
9
405
I. VOCABULARY: Read the introduction and fill in the following sentences with the
words below, according to context. The paragraphs in which the words appear are
written in parentheses next to each word.
Predictor (2) / generate (3) / notable (4) / reapply (5)
arrogance (9) / conventional (10) / notion (10)
/ commodity (7) /
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1. He is very ___________________, and not very original, in his thinking. He needs
to broaden his horizons.
2. She was an excellent scientist, because she was able not only to memorize ideas,
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but also to ________________ them.
3. Humility, and not _______________________, will earn you respect.
4. The revolutionaries' ___________________ of intelligence is broader than that of
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the traditionalists.
5. Her expertise was a real __________________: it helped everyone in the group.
6. Exam scores are only one ___________________ of success. Other
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___________________ factors include creativity and the ability to cooperate with
people.
II. GLOBAL READING
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1) Based on the introductory section (paragraphs 1-10) write down the author’s two
main points:
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Point 1:
______________________________________________________________
Point 2:
______________________________________________________________
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2) By skimming, give a title to paragraphs 11-15.
_______________________________
3) By skimming, give a title to paragraphs 1621._______________________________
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4) Skim paragraphs 22-36. What kind of information is given in these paragraphs?
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___________________________________ (one word)
Bar Ilan University
A. Ben-Hillel
EFL Department
August 2009
10
II. CLOSE READING
Answer the following questions based on each section in the text.
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Paragraphs 11-15:
5) In regard to intelligence testing, is the author:
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a traditionalist
or
a revolutionary? (Circle the correct answer.)
Paragraphs 16-21:
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6) Which of the following are criticisms that the revolutionaries make of the
traditionalists? (Mark as many statements as appropriate.)
___ The current methods for intelligence testing are unsound.
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___ There needs to be a stricter definition of I.Q.
___The tasks given on conventional tests are unable to measure intelligence.
___The notion of g (general factor) is biased against people of other races.
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___The notion of g (general factor) is too restrictive to define intelligence.
___The traditionalists do not define intelligence broadly enough.
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7) What does the author’s theory of intelligence claim? Try to state in your own
words.
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___________________________________________________________________
___
___________________________________________________________________
___
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Paragraphs 37-53:
8) In this section, the author ________________ the results of his research (one
word).
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9) What does the writer mean by “casting a broader net” (l. 367)?
___________________________________________________________________
___
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___________________________________________________________________
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10) What does the writer mean by “cognitive elite” (l. 401) and how does it hurt
people’s chances to build their careers?
_____________________________________________
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___________________________________________________________________
__
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Bar Ilan University
A. Ben-Hillel
515
EFL Department
August 2009
11) Does the writer believe that students who score low on tests are able to do well in
their careers? CIRCLE:
YES
NO
Quote a sentence from the text which supports this view. Para. Number: ____
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___________________________________________________________________
___
___________________________________________________________________
___
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12) In paragraph 41, the examples of scientists and novelists support the author’s
point that:
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___________________________________________________________________
___
___________________________________________________________________
___
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***Extra credit (up to 3 points added to the next quiz grade): In a paragraph of 68 sentences, describe IN YOUR OWN WORDS the results of the second study that
the author conducted. (Both studies are described in paragraphs 22-36.)
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