Multiple Intelligences - An Interview With Howard Gardner

In my own work, I'm a proponent of teaching for understanding, which means going deeply into topics so that students can really make use of knowledge in new situations. This is very, very different from most teaching, where people memorize material and can reproduce it on demand but can't make use of it in new situations. That's what understanding entails. If you favor education for understanding the way I do, then MI can be extremely helpful. Because when you are teaching a topic, you can approach the topic in many ways, thereby activating different intelligences. You can provide analogies and metaphors for different domains, invading different intelligences, and finally, you can present the key ideas in a number of different languages or symbol systems, again activating different intelligences.

But obviously you can't do that if you're going to spend five minutes on a topic and then move on to something. Then you're almost constrained to present it one way, which is usually verbally, and to give people a short-answer test. You can see that I'm very much in opposition to the current state and national trends, which create more tests, often of a short-answer sort, favoring coverage or noncoverage and not probing deeply into what people really understand.

Can standardized tests ever hope to measure children's full intelligence?

I'm not in favor of tests that are designed to measure people's intelligence, because frankly I don't care what intelligence or intelligences people have. I care whether they can do things which we value in our culture. What good is it to know if you have an IQ of 90 or 110 or even if you can jack it up to 120 through a lot of training if, in the end, you can't do anything.

I think our assessments ought to focus on the kinds of things we want people to understand, and they ought to give people a chance to perform their understandings. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you have an IQ of 160 if you sit around and do nothing. What's important is whatever IQ you have or whatever profile of intelligences you have, that you can demonstrate knowledge and understanding of things that matter.

So do you think the high-stakes testing movement that we're seeing now is going to force people to abandon different approaches to teaching?

Yes. Current approaches almost inevitably push people to teach to the test,

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