Word: gardners
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...Gardner is first to decide on the facts and procedures a teacher wants a student to understand, and then to figure out how best to present this information, given the student's strengths and weaknesses. Jean McKibben, a fifth-grade teacher at Coyote Creek, provided an example of such an approach when she described a project her students did about the European settlement of the Americas. Among other things, she wanted them to learn about the boats that were used...
...Gardner is right about that. Still, many neurologists and psychologists believe recent discoveries in brain science--the localization of particular traits, the proliferation and pruning of synapses--are far too poorly understood to guide educators. Meanwhile, students of cognition, even those who give Gardner much credit, cite research that contradicts him. "The different intelligences show correlations in many cases, and within intelligence, there is a lack of unity," said Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology and education at Yale. In other words, some of Gardner's intelligences do not seem to be independent faculties, while other intelligences divide up into...
...science, then, there may be less to the theory of multiple intelligences than many educators seem to believe. That may not matter so much. Gardner and other researchers say it's not necessary for a theory to enjoy absolute scientific confirmation as long as it shows good results in the classroom. But does MI show such results...
...Gardner has never laid down a detailed plan for applying his theory in schools, and the consultants and publishers who offer training in MI operate independently of him, so there is a wide range of actual practices. A few hundred schools, like Coyote Creek, use the theory in a thoroughgoing way; thousands more adopt pieces of it. The result is that the methods that go under the name of multiple intelligences are often ones Gardner would not approve of. He insists, for example, that it is a waste of time to simply "exercise the intelligence muscles...
...McKibben said of one pupil. "His main emphasis is doing things with his hands. His model of the boat was fantastic. It showed he really knew the information. If I asked him to write it down, it would have been very short." This is just the kind of application Gardner envisions: because McKibben knew that Dave understood the world in a kinesthetic way, she was better able to teach him and assess his knowledge. Dave must still learn to write well, McKibben said, but what counted here was that he showed good understanding of the material...