A blog about economics instruction. "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."--Albert Einstein

Friday, June 10, 2005

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences--Implications for Teaching and Learning

Thanks to Professor Lamp, I have a list of Howard Gardner's 7 intelligences. Professor Lamp discusses these from the perspective of gifted and talented children. I've taken a stab at laying out the perspective from the podium in an Economics 101 class.

1. Linguistic
Students with this intelligence are probably majoring in English or foreign languages. They might be bloggers, if they have a technological bent. They enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing crossword puzzles. I've created economics crossword puzzles for my classes to help linguistic learners master the subject. I'm also always interspersing true stories with technical material.

2. Logical-Mathematical
These are the math, science, and economics majors. Learners with lots of logical intelligence are interested in patterns, categories and relationships. They are drawn to arithmetic problems, strategy games and experiments. There are lots of these kinds of learning resources in course study guides provided with economics texts. Assigning study guide exercises would help these students to learn.

3. Bodily-Kinesthetic
Dance and kinesiology are likely to be the majors of choice for these learners, who process knowledge through bodily sensations. They could also be majoring in art or sculpture. They are often athletic, dancers, or good at crafts and other hands-on activities. In economics, students whose primary intelligence is kinesthetic will be at a disadvantage relative to other learners.

4. Spatial
I presume that art and sculpture majors would possess this intelligence in large amounts. These learners think in images and pictures. They may be fascinated with mazes or jigsaw puzzles, or spend free time drawing, daydreaming, or building models. This is a good intelligence for engineering, architecture, and economics majors to possess, too. Graphing assignments in economics would help these students learn.

5. Musical
I hope that music majors possess a heaping quantity of this intelligence. These learners are often discriminating listeners. I would imagine that lectures and sound files posted on a course web site would help them learn economics.

6. Interpersonal
Learners who are leaders, who are good at communicating and who seem to understand others' feelings and motives possess interpersonal intelligence. Group projects in economics allow learners with interpersonal intelligence to excel.

7. Intrapersonal
These people may be shy. They are very aware of their own feelings and are self-motivated. Appealing to that sense of self motivation may be the key to increasing the learning of economics with these students.

Too bad there's no easy way to determine the primary intelligence of each student in an Economics 101 class. What I'm left with is preparing course materials that appeal to a variety of intelligences. Since there is debate about the validity of the multiple intelligences theory, here's a little example of how a computer programmer uses several intelligences:

Gardner (1983) proposes that there are seven forms of intelligence: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal (e.g., insight, metacognition), and interpersonal (e.g., social skills). As a computer programmer, I use a number of these different kinds of intelligence on a regular basis. For example, writing a Pascal program requires extensive use of logical-mathematical intelligence. Choosing recognizable variable names requires linguistic intelligence. Debugging requires intrapersonal intelligence in order to arrive at that, "Ah, ha!" experience of recognizing the problem that needs to be fixed. Finally, when I run into an especially difficult problem, interpersonal intelligence is required to get help.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Ronald M. Ayers said...

RE: Sue's comment: That would be fun to give the Gardner quiz. As a student, I would be interested to know which one's I have the most of.

2:24 AM

 

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