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scientifi c underpinnings. While it’s true that most all of us have a decided preference for how we like to learn new material, the premise behind learning styles is that we learn better when the mode of pre sen ta tion matches the par tic u lar style in which an individual is best able to learn. That is the critical claim.
In 2008 the cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork were commissioned to conduct a review to determine whether this critical claim is supported by scientifi c evidence. The team set out to answer two questions. First, what forms of evidence are needed for institutions to justify basing their instructional styles on assessments of students’ or employees’ learning styles? For the results to be credible, the team determined that a study would need to have several attributes. Initially, students must be divided into groups according to their learning styles. Then they must be randomly assigned to different classrooms teaching the same material but offering it through different instructional methods. Afterward, all the students must take the same test.
The test must show that students with a par tic u lar learning style (e.g., visual learners) did the best when they received instruction in their own learning style (visual) relative to instruction in a different style (auditory); in addition, the other types of learners must be shown to profi t more from their style of instruction than another style (auditory learners learning better from auditory than from visual pre sen ta tion).
The second question the team asked was whether this kind of evidence existed. The answer was no. They found very few studies designed to be capable of testing the validity of learning styles theory in education, and of those, they found that virtually none validate it and several fl atly contradict it. Moreover, their review showed that it is more important that the mode of instruction match the nature of the subject being
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taught: visual instruction for geometry and geography, verbal instruction for poetry, and so on. When instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their differing preferences for how the material is taught.
The fact that the evidence is not there to validate learning styles theory doesn’t mean that all theories are wrong. Learning styles theories take many forms. Some may be valid. But if so, we can’t know which: because the number of rigorous studies is extremely small, the research base does not exist to answer the question. On the basis of their fi ndings, Pashler and his colleagues argued that the evidence currently available does not justify the huge investment of time and money that would be needed to assess students and restructure instruction around learning styles. Until such evidence is produced, it makes more sense to emphasize the instructional techniques, like those outlined in this book, that have been validated by research as benefi ting learners regardless of their style preferences.6
Successful Intelligence
Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters, but what exactly is it? Every human society has a concept that corresponds to the idea of intelligence in our culture. The problem of how to defi ne and mea sure intelligence in a way that accounts for people’s intellectual horse power and provides a fair indicator of their potential has been with us for over a hundred years, with psychologists trying to mea sure this construct since early in the twentieth century. Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold informa-
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tion in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.7
Traditionally, IQ tests have been used to mea sure individuals’ logical and verbal potential. These tests assign an Intelligence Quotient, which denotes the ratio of mental age to physical age, times 100. That is, an eight- year- old who can solve problems on a test that most ten- year- olds can solve has an IQ of 125 (10 divided by 8, times 100). It used to be thought that IQ was fi xed from birth, but traditional notions of intellectual capacity are being challenged.
One countervailing idea, put forward by the psychologist Howard Gardner to account for the broad variety in people’s abilities, is the hypothesis that humans have as many as eight different kinds of intelligence:
Logical- mathematical intelligence: ability to think critically, work with numbers and abstractions, and the like; Spatial intelligence: three- dimensional judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind’s eye; Linguistic intelligence: ability to work with words and languages;
Kinesthetic intelligence: physical dexterity and control of one’s body;
Musical intelligence: sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones, and music;
Interpersonal intelligence: ability to “read” other people and work with them effectively;
Intrapersonal intelligence: ability to understand one’s self and make accurate judgments of one’s knowledge, abilities, and effectiveness;
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Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to discriminate and relate to one’s natural surroundings (for example, the kinds of intelligence invoked by a gardener, hunter, or chef).
Gardner’s ideas are attractive for many reasons, not the least because they attempt to explain human differences that we can observe but cannot account for with modern, Western defi nitions of intelligence with their focus on language and logic abilities. As with learning styles theory, the multiple intelligences model has helped educators to diversify the kinds of learning experiences they offer. Unlike learning styles, which can have the perverse effect of causing individuals to perceive their learning abilities as limited, multiple intelligences theory elevates the sheer variety of tools in our native toolkit. What both theories lack is an underpinning of empirical validation, a problem Gardner himself recognizes, acknowledging that determining one’s par tic u lar mix of intelligences is more an art than a science.8
While Gardner helpfully expands our notion of intelligence, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again.
Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research.9
One of Sternberg’s studies of par tic u lar interest to the question of how we mea sure intelligence was carried out in rural Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. Regular use of these medicines is an important part of Kenyans’ daily lives. This knowledge is not taught in schools or assessed by tests, but children who can identify the herbs and who know their appropriate uses and dosages are better adapted to succeed in their environment than children without that knowledge. The children who performed best on tests of this indigenous informal knowledge did worst relative to their peers on tests of the
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formal academic subjects taught in school and, in Sternberg’s words, appeared to be “stupid” by the metric of the formal tests. How to reconcile the discrepancy? Sternberg suggests that the children who excelled at indigenous knowledge came from families who valued such practical knowledge more highly than the families of the children who excelled at the academics taught in school. Children whose environments prized one kind of learning over another (practical over academic, in the case of the families who taught their children about herbs) were at a lower level of knowledge in the academic areas not emphasized by their environment. Other families placed more value on the analytic (school- based) information and less on the practical herbal knowledge.
There are two important ideas here. First, traditional mea-sures of intelligence failed to account for environmental differences; there is no reason to suspect that kids who excelled at informal, indigenous knowledge can’t catch up to or even surpass their peers in academic learning when given the appropriate opportunities. Second, for the kids whose environments emphasized indigenous knowledge, the mastery of academics is still developing. In Sternberg’s view, we’re all in a state of developing expertise, and any test that mea sures only what we know at any given moment is a static mea sure that tells us nothing about our potential in the realm the test mea sures.
Two other quick stories Sternberg cites are useful here.
One is a series of studies of orphaned children in Brazil who must learn to start and run street businesses if they are to survive. Motivation is high; if they turn to theft as a means to sustain themselves, they risk running afoul of the death squads.
These children, who are doing the math required in order to run successful businesses, cannot do the same math when the problems are presented in an abstract, paper- and- pencil
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format. Sternberg argues that this result makes sense when viewed from the standpoint of developing expertise: the children live in an environment that emphasizes practical skills, not academic, and it’s the practical exigencies that determine the substance and form of the learning.10
The other story is about seasoned, expert handicappers at horse tracks who devise highly complex mental models for betting on horses but who mea sure only average on standard IQ tests. Their handicapping models were tested against those devised by less expert handicappers with equivalent IQs.
Handicapping requires comparing horses against a long list of variables for each horse, such as its lifetime earnings, its lifetime speed, the races where it came in the money, the ability of its jockey in the current race, and a dozen characteristics of each of its prior races. Just to predict the speed with which a horse would run the fi nal quarter mile, the experts relied on a complex mental model involving as many as seven variables. The study found that IQ is unrelated to handicapping ability, and “what ever it is that an IQ test mea sures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multi-variate reasoning.”11
Into this void Robert Sternberg has introduced his three-part theory of successful intelligence. Analytical intelligence is our ability to complete problem- solving tasks such as those typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to synthesize and apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability to adapt to everyday life— to understand what needs to be done in a specifi c setting and then do it; what we call street smarts.
Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in a par tic u lar situation is not mea sured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies.
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Dynamic Testing
Robert Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko have proposed the idea of using testing to assess ability in a dynamic manner.
