Multiple Intelligence of Perspective Teachers

When Howard Gardener and others carved out their respective projects, he received an interesting assignment: to write a book about what had been established about human cognition through discoveries in the biological and behavioral sciences. Thus was born the research program that led to the theory of multiple-intelligence, according to its own rules in relative autonomy from the others. Howard Gardner of Harvard University has propounded a unique theory of intelligence called the “theory of Multiple Intelligence”. It first appeared in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind: The theory of Multiple Intelligence. Through his new theory, Gardner challenged the notion of general intelligence, “g” and then questioned the very basis of prevailing intelligence tests by asking how an individual’s intellectual capacities could be captured in a single measure of intelligence. Indeed, he tried to give a broad base to the concept of intelligence and its measurement by providing a multiple frame. He asserted that human intelligence or cognitive competence can be better described as a set of an individual’s multiple abilities, talents and mental skills related to a multiple number of domains of knowledge in a particular cultural setting. Elaborating his pluralistic view of intelligence further, he concluded that there are seven independent types of intelligence that grow and develop differently in different people, depending upon their hereditary characteristics or environmental experiences. By calling them independent, Gardner meant that each intelligence is a relatively autonomous intellectual potential which is capable of functioning independently of the other. These different types of intelligence have been named by him as linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal (Mangal, S. K., 2008, p. 289).