SPED 3300K – Assignment Due October 22

10 Points
Watch Beyond Wit and Grit: Rethinking the Keys to Success | Howard Gardner. This is the
inventor of the theory of multiple intelligences giving a talk outlining his theory and introducing
a framework to use it as a teacher.
Read the article Brain-based learning by Youki Terada, in which unpacks the realities of the
theory of multiple intelligences in the classroom. (Spoiler alert: he highlights some issues with
its use.)
Respond to the following questions. (These can be uploaded on their own in blackboard.

 Video: how might the ideas in the video connect to your growth as a practitioner of quality
instruction?

 Article: There are some suggested ways (“Dos”) to adjust instruction in the context of
multiple intelligences. Are you doing any of these in your classroom, or what can you
imagine adjusting in your classroom in light of these suggestions?

 Article: There are some suggested “don’ts” in the article. Do any of these connect to your
classroom or other experiences inside schools?

 Both Article and Video: Are there any disagreements or tensions between the perspectives
of the article and the video? What are they, and what do you think about them?

BRAIN-BASED LEARNING

Multiple Intelligences Theory: Widely Used, Yet Misunderstood

One of the most popular ideas in education is applied in ways that its creator
never intended.

By Youki Terada
 Ikon Images/Stuart Kinlough

When Howard Gardner introduced his multiple intelligences theory 35 years

ago, it was a revolutionary idea that challenged long-cherished beliefs.

At the time, psychologists were interested in general intelligence—a person’s

ability to solve problems and apply logical reasoning across a wide range of
disciplines. Popularized in part by the IQ test, which was originally developed
in the early 1900s to assess a child’s ability to “understand, reason, and make
judgments,” the idea of general intelligence helped explain why some students
seemed to excel at many subjects. Gardner found the concept too limiting.

“Most lay and scholarly writings about intelligence focus on a combination of

linguistic and logical intelligences. The particular intellectual strengths, I often
maintain, of a law professor,” Gardner explains . Having grown up playing
piano, Gardner wondered why the arts weren’t included in discussions about
intelligence. As a graduate student studying psychology in the 1960s, he
felt “struck by the virtual absence of any mention of the arts in the key
textbooks.”
That doubt planted the seed that grew into Gardner’s big insight: The prevailing
idea of a single, monolithic intelligence didn’t match the world he observed.
Surely Mozart’s genius was partially, but not fully, explained by an
extraordinary musical intelligence. And wasn’t it the case that all people
demonstrated a wide range of intellectual capabilities—from linguistic to social
to logical—that were often mutually reinforcing, and that ebbed and flowed over
time based on a person’s changing interests and efforts?

Those hypotheses have largely been confirmed by recent studies from the
fields of neuroscience. A 2015 study , for example, upends the centuries-old
idea that reading occurs in distinct areas of the brain; scientists have
discovered, instead, that language processing “involves all of the regions of the
brain, because it involves all cognitive functioning of humans”—not just visual
processing but also attention, abstract reasoning, working memory, and
predicting, to name a few. And a growing body of evidence has dramatically
altered our understanding of brain development , revealing that we continue to
grow and change intellectually well into adulthood.

MISTAKES WERE MADE

But if Gardner’s objective was to broaden and democratize our conception of
intelligence—an idea that resonates deeply with teachers—the pull of the old
model has been hard to shake. Today, the idea of multiple intelligences is as
popular as ever, but it’s starting to look suspiciously like the theory Gardner
sought to displace.

“It’s true that I write a lot and also that I am misunderstood a lot,” says
Gardner , who originally proposed seven distinct intelligences, adding an eighth
a decade later. The big mistake: In popular culture, and in our educational
system, the theory of multiple intelligences has too often been conflated with
learning styles, reducing Gardner’s premise of a multifaceted system back to a
single “preferred intelligence”: Students are visual or auditory learners, for
example, but never both. We’ve stumbled into the same old trap—we’ve simply
traded one intelligence for another.

“If people want to talk about ‘an impulsive style’ or ‘a visual learner,’ that’s their
prerogative,” Gardner clarifies . “But they should recognize that these labels
may be unhelpful, at best, and ill-conceived at worst.”

It’s clear that children learn differently—teachers in Edutopia’s audience are

adamant on that score—but research shows that when students process and
retain information, there is no dominant biological style, and that when
teachers try to match instruction to a perceived learning style, the benefits are
nonexistent.

Still, the idea endures..

WIDE ACCEPTANCE

Over 90 percent of teachers believe that students learn better when they
receive information tailored to their preferred learning styles, but that’s a
myth, explains Paul Howard-Jones , professor of neuroscience and education at
the University of Bristol. “The brain’s interconnectivity makes such an
assumption unsound, and reviews of educational literature and controlled
laboratory studies fail to support this approach to teaching.”

Students are also swayed by the idea. In a study published earlier this year ,
medical professors Polly Husmann and Valerie O’Loughlin found that many of
their students “still hold to the conventional wisdom that learning styles are
legitimate,” and often adapt their study strategies to match these learning
styles. But after analyzing the test scores of these students, researchers found
no improvement. Instead, they found that tried-and-true strategies—such as
viewing microscope slides online—worked equally well for all students, whether
they considered themselves linguistic or visual learners.
The study highlights the value of learning through multiple modalities, which is
an effective way to boost memory and understanding. A 2015 study found that
students have a deeper conceptual understanding of a lesson when teachers
pair lectures with diagrams. And a review spanning three decades of
research found that students retain more information when textbooks contain
illustrations because the images complement the text. When students use more
than one medium to process a lesson, learning is more deeply encoded—and
being overly reliant on a perceived dominant learning style is a recipe for
learning less effectively.

SOME DOS AND DON’TS

So what should teachers do? Gardner argues that “multiple intelligences
should not, in and of itself, be an educational goal.” Instead, here are a
few evidence-based dos and don’ts for applying multiple intelligences theory in
your classroom.

Do:

 Give students multiple ways to access information: Not only will your lessons
be more engaging, but students will be more likely to remember
information that’s presented in different ways.

 Individualize your lessons: It still makes sense to differentiate your instruction,

even if students don’t have a single dominant learning style. Avoid a one-size-
fits-all method of teaching, and think about students’ needs and interests.

 Incorporate the arts into your lessons: Schools often focus on the linguistic
and logical intelligences, but we can nurture student growth by letting them
express themselves in different ways. As Gardner explains, “My theory of
multiple intelligences provides a basis for education in the arts. According to
this theory, all of us as human beings possess a number of intellectual
potentials.”
Don’t:

 Label students with a particular type of intelligence: By pigeonholing students,

we deny them opportunities to learn at a deeper, richer level. Labels—such as
“book smart” or “visual learner”—can be harmful when they discourage
students from exploring other ways of thinking and learning, or from
developing their weaker skills.

 Confuse multiple intelligences with learning styles: A popular misconception is

that learning styles is a useful classroom application of multiple intelligences
theory. “This notion is incoherent,” argues Gardner. We read and process
spatial information with our eyes, but reading and processing require different
types of intelligence. It doesn’t matter what sense we use to pick up
information—what matters is how our brain processes that information. “Drop
the term styles. It will confuse others, and it won't help either you or your
students,” Gardner suggests.

 Try to match a lesson to a student’s perceived learning style: Although

students may have a preference for how material is presented, there’s little
evidence that matching materials to a preference will enhance learning. In
matching, an assumption is made that there’s a single best way to learn,
which may ultimately prevent students and teachers from using strategies that
work. “When one has a thorough understanding of a topic, one can typically
think of it in several ways,” Gardner explains.