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Howard Gardner was recently interviewed by Big Think regarding his opinions on standardized testing. While he values assessment in school settings, Dr. Gardner states that we've come to overvalue one kind of test (multiple-choice, short-answer exam) that measures only one kind of intelligence. View the full video below:
This video originally appeared on the knowledge forum Big Think, here.
This month's edition of the ASCD publication Educational Leadership covers topics dealing with "Learning for Life". In his featured essay, "Principal Connection/Multiple Ways to Learn", Thomas R. Hoerr discusses intelligence, communication, multiple intelligences, and the recent passage of the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA).
Like Tom Hoerr, I am pleased whenever, as an educator, I encounter the modifier ‘multiple’. And when the White House endorses ‘multiple measures’ of student learning and ‘other indicators of student success’, I feel that our work and our words over many years may finally be gaining some traction.
That said, as always, the importance lies in the details. For example, Mark Zuckerberg has now pledged a significant amount of his fortune to pursuing ‘personalized learning.” But the modifier ‘personalized’ could range from simply varying the speed at which items are presented to teaching via topics that interest the learner. By the same token, ‘multiple” could simply mean administering a number of standardized tests; or offering open-ended as well as multiple choice options; or providing rich contexts with embedded challenges and noting how well students work individually or in groups.
Still, not to end on a downer, multiple measures are certainly preferable to a single test—which almost always means ‘the latest from ETS’.
For further reference, the original text of Thomas Hoerr's essay can be found below.
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Principal Connection / Multiple Ways to Learn
Thomas R. Hoerr
How important is it that every student in a school is excited about learning? Should we allow a student to use all her strengths in learning? Do you know someone who wasn't a particularly good student but has been very successful in life?
What these seemingly unrelated questions have in common is an appreciation for the range of talents that students—that all of us, really—possess. Answering them leads us to the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) conceived by Howard Gardner.1 My school began implementing MI in 1988. MI was not a panacea, but our school was filled with students and teachers who were excited about learning. And over the next decade-plus, hundreds of educators visited us each year to see how they could use MI to help more children learn and to help children learn more.
Then in 2001, No Child Left Behind was passed, and it became harder for teachers and principals to use multiple intelligences. Students' skills in the three Rs, determined by scores on standardized tests, became the measure of teacher and principal effectiveness. Educators knew the scores weren't all that mattered, but they also knew scores were what mattered most. In 2009, Race to the Top widened the path—but not by much.The recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) appears to be a step in the right direction. The White House notes that
the bill encourages a smarter approach to testing by moving away from a sole focus on standardized tests to drive decisions around the quality of schools, and by allowing for the use of multiple measures of student learning and progress, along with other indicators of student success to make school accountability decisions.2
I'm encouraged by ESSA, but I'm also hesitant. "Multiple measures" sounds good, but it will be hard to back away from the ease and objectivity of standardized measures. Failing to do so would be our loss—and a loss for our students.Intelligence is problem solving, and many problems are best solved by using a combination of intelligences. In schools, we typically limit students to using the scholastic intelligences—linguistic and logical-mathematical. Employing the musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, naturalist, intrapersonal, or interpersonal intelligences isn't encouraged as an option. That's unfortunate because these nonscholastic intelligences are integral to solving many of the problems we face every day.
Communication in the real world travels through many intelligences. The written word is only one way to describe events or relay messages. Often messages come to us through music, art, animation, or artifacts—so why not enable students to use these intelligences to share what they've learned?
At my school, for example, students read about the U.S. Civil War. But they also watch videos, access museum websites, touch artifacts, and visit nearby relevant locations. And although they take tests and write reports, they also build dioramas, draw timelines, develop plays with characters presenting differing points of view, and create poems or music that capture the times and tensions of that era.Likewise, in studying citizens who have made a difference in their community or the world, our students read about and write biographies of famous people. But they also use other intelligences for learning and sharing their knowledge. During Living Museum Day, they make presentations while dressed in costumes they created. Students from other classes, parents, and educators come to the "museum" (our library) to hear the oral presentations and then ask questions of Rosa Parks, John F. Kennedy, Michelangelo, or Mia Hamm. Preparing to present in the museum requires students to do research, write a report, make a costume, create an artifact, give an oral presentation, and respond to audience questions. No child fails at the Living Museum. Every student is excited about learning and uses different intelligences to show what he or she has learned.We value all intelligences at New City School, but we give a special focus to the personal intelligences because we believe that who you are is more important than what you know. The first page of every student's report card focuses solely on the personal intelligences—interpersonal (understanding others) and intrapersonal (knowing yourself). That emphasis is also reflected throughout our curriculum. Teachers are always on the lookout for ways to help children develop kindness, an appreciation for others, and grit.
My fingers are crossed that ESSA will allow us to return to using multiple intelligences to help students learn. How could you help your teachers use MI to increase student learning?
Endnotes
1 Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind. New York: Basic Books.
2 Muñoz, C. (2015, December 7). Q&A: What you need to know about the fix to No Child Left Behind [blog post]. Retrieved from The White House Blog.
Thomas R. Hoerr is emeritus head of school at the New City School in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Becoming a Multiple Intelligences School (ASCD, 2000) and Fostering Grit: How Do I Prepare My Students for the Real World? (ASCD, 2013). Follow him on Twitter.
Natalie Angier's article New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' discusses new findings from Dr. Nancy Kanwisher and Dr. Josh H. McDermott that suggest that there are neural pathways that react almost exclusively to music. Unlike previous studies that failed to find a distinct, anatomical music center in the brain, Kanwisher and McDermott's study showed that music circuits occupy a different region of the brain's auditory cortex than speech.
When I proposed the theory of multiple intelligences many years ago, one of the most important criteria for the identification of an intelligence was its localization in the brain. To be sure, this was not the only criterion: some abilities (e.g. face recognition) that are localized are insufficiently broad to qualify as an intelligence; and some intelligences have a broad or varied representation in the brain.
It’s long been known that musical abilities have a cortical representation that differs from language abilities: that is why one can have aphasia without amusia, or amusia without aphasia. But the new approach to brain imaging developed at MI has made a notable discovery; there are distinct neural pathways in the auditory cortex which respond preferentially to the sound of music, and those pathways are clearly different from those that respond to preferentially to linguistic sounds. Notable is the testimony of Elizabeth Margulis of the University of Arkansas. She points out that proponents of musical intelligence used to have to claim that music’s specialness derives from its integration of parts of the nervous system that had evolved for other purposes. But now, says Margulis, “when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech”.
I have always maintained that no single line of evidence can prove or disprove MI theory; there are no decisive experiments. Rather, what determine the validity of the theory is the steady accumulation of empirical evidence from a variety of sources and a variety of sciences. This research, from the laboratory of distinguished MIT research Nancy Kanwisher, is one more brick of evidence in favor of the edifice of multiple intelligences.
In November, Howard Gardner was interviewed by journalist Esther Cepeda regarding his views on 'learning styles'. Below is the final result of that interview.
The original post can be read here.
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Esther Cepeda: Teachers must let go of the ‘learning styles’ myth
Saturday, February 13, 2016
The education industry is nothing if not trend-driven, and sometimes fads manage to calcify into indisputable “facts” that spur backlash when challenged.
Take the mini-revolt over the recent boomlet of myth-busting news articles about “learning styles,” the theory that some people learn better through movement, others through reading or listening and so on.
Just post links to Quartz’s “The concept of different ‘learning styles’ is one of the greatest neuroscience myths” or New York Magazine’s “One Reason the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth Persists” on your Facebook timeline and watch otherwise gentle, openhearted educators descend into bitter disputes about the challenges of being an auditory learner in a text-rich society.
My first brush with the “learning styles” credo was in a graduate-level education program that promoted it as an article of faith for any new teacher.
A decade later, not teaching for different learning styles is considered akin to educational malpractice. Some educators believe that not presenting every concept to students in each of the many styles—kinesthetic, visual, auditory—is nothing short of bigotry because it discriminates against those who don’t learn in “traditional” ways.
Students have internalized this responsibility-absolving mantra through the years. I spent this past fall semester in a music theory course at my local community college with young adults who unfailingly challenged our professor’s classroom instruction, homework and tests with “learning style” complaints.
If we were doing aural training, someone would whine about being a visual learner. The written tests were “too hard” for the kinesthetic learners because they weren’t good at writing on paper, and so on. It was ridiculous—we were, after all, in a music class where reading, writing and listening to music were required, and had been clearly articulated in the course description.
I’m too jaded about how tenaciously educators cling to their dogmas to believe that the overemphasis on differentiated learning styles will soon recede from practice. The “everybody’s special” ethos of teacher education tends to treat the “learning styles” theory as though a student’s preferred method of processing new information automatically makes him or her incapable of learning through any other means. It is heartening to see attempts at dismantling the legend.
“Over and over, researchers have failed to find any substantive evidence for the notion of learning styles, to the point where it’s been designated a ‘neuromyth’ by some education and psychology experts,” writes Jesse Singal in a recent issue of New York Magazine.
The reason the myth lives on, according to Christian Jarrett in Wired magazine, is the educational-industrial complex.
“It is propagated not only in hundreds of popular books,” Jarrett wrote, “but also through international conferences and associations, by commercial companies who sell ways of measuring learning styles, and in teacher-training programs.”
Howard Gardner, who over 30 years ago did groundbreaking research on the notion of multiple intelligences—which include logical-mathematical, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal, spatial and others, which all work in concert—has gone out of his way to differentiate his work from the shorthand of “learning styles.”
On The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, Gardner wrote, “If people want to talk about ‘an impulsive style’ or ‘a visual learner,’ that’s their prerogative. But they should recognize that these labels may be unhelpful, at best, and ill-conceived at worst.”
When I spoke to Gardner about the danger of using his research and the now-ubiquitous “learning styles” as a crutch for students or an excuse for teachers to not push students to perform up to their potential, he said: “I’m against uniform schools. And everybody’s got his or her own way of learning, but we’re not going to expect all schools to accommodate them all.
“There has to be a middle ground. We don’t want to make every student learn in the same way, but we also don’t want to encourage students to not have to stretch out of their comfort zone and show some grit. The way I would put it is that kids should get as much help as they need to learn, but not one whit more.”
Teachers are well meaning, but buying into the “learning styles” myth has not been definitively shown to improve educational outcomes. So let it die already. Rather than waste valuable time trying to cater to every possible learning preference, teachers would do better to help all students develop a full range of skills and competencies.
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Esther J. Cepeda is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.
This article originally appeared on http://www.gazettextra.com/.
A recent study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics explored the use of Multiple Intelligences in teaching English as a second language in classrooms in Beirut, Lebanon. Conducted by Norma Ghamrawi over the course of one academic year, the study sought to answer the following research questions:
#1: How does the application of the MI theory in one school’s KG II ESL classrooms impact students’ acquisition of vocabulary?
#2 What relationship exists between the MI profile of teachers and the kind of intelligences they most often address in their classrooms?
#3 What is the predominant level of thinking skills (low/high on Bloom’s Taxonomy) that teachers address when they use the MI theory?
Ghamrawi utilized videotaped school sessions, student interviews, and surveys to determine that students taught in MI classes exhibited higher rates of retention of new vocabulary.
To read the published results of Ghamrawi's study, click on the link below:
