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What is This?
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supervisors may be tempted to use IQ tests exclusively in Instruction and Assessment of the Achievement
identification. To many people, they give an appearance of of Gifted Children for Successful Intelligence
objectivity, fairness, reliability, and validity that other
measures may not easily match. For a variety of reasons, We combine instruction and assessment of achieve-
this appearance is deceptive (Gardner, 1983; Sternberg, ment into one section in this article because we believe that
1997a). We believe, however, that IQ tests and their instruction and assessment ought to be of one piece-
equivalents can provide one among several useful bases for instruction must match assessment and vice versa. More
identification. While they provide useful information, in generally, identification, instruction, and assessment all
many cases, about children's analytical abilities, they say must match. If identification does not match instruction
little or nothing about creative and practical abilities and assessment, then one may end up with children who are
(Sternberg, 1985, 1997a, 1999b). identified for one set of abilities failing because the instruc-
To identify gifted students in terms of the theory of tion and assessment do not match their strengths. Ifinstruc-
successful intelligence, we prefer to use a variety of tion does not match assessment, children very quickly come
measures: to view the instruction as a game and start paying attention
* standardized tests of memory and analytical abilities only to what they will be assessed on, not what is done in
(tests of IQ, SAT, ACT, SSAT, etc.);1 the classroom. Ultimately, children should think to learn so
* standardized tests of achievement that measure more that they learn to think, and they can learn equally from
developed memory and analytical competencies (such classroom instruction and from classroom assessments.
as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the Stanford Teaching and assessing achievement for successful
Achievement Tests); intelligence involves three basic sets of ideas. These sets of
* teachers' grades and comments, which assess memory ideas include a set of principles, a set of techniques, and a
and analytical abilities, as well as motivational and set of skills to be developed.
other variables relevant to achievement; Principles of teaching and assessing for successful intelligence.
* STAT (Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test), as There are seven main principles of teaching for successful
described above, a nonstandardized test that can be intelligence (Sternberg, 1998b). These principles must be
used in conjunction with other measures but never adhered to in all instruction and assessment:
alone, which measures analytical, creative, and practi- * The goal of instruction is the creation of expertise
cal abilities; through a well and flexibly organized, easily retriev-
* evaluations of existing products, projects, and portfo- able, knowledge base.
lios for analytical, creative, and practical skills; * Instruction should involve teaching for analytical, cre-
* SI Student Questionnaire, which is a questionnaire for ative, and practical thinking, as well as for memory
students regarding their preferences and skills (see learning.
Table 1); * Assessment should also involve analytical, creative,
* SI Teacher Questionnaire, which is comparable to the and practical, as well as memory components.
SI Student Questionnaire, except that evaluations are * Instruction and assessment should enable students to
done by teachers instead of students (see Table 1); and identify and capitalize on their strengths.
* tasks created by teachers, such as having students write * Instruction and assessment should enable students to
stories or reports, draw pictures, create advertise- identify, correct, and, as necessary, compensate for
ments, solve novel problems, solve practical problems, weaknesses.
and so forth. * Instruction should help students (a) adapt to the envi-
We believe that converging measures such as those ronment (change themselves to suit the environment
above provide a better basis for identification than can any better), (b) shape the environment (change the envi-
one measure. There is no magic formula for combining ronment to suit them better), and (c) select new envi-
information from these eight converging operations. ronments.
Rather, each district must decide for itself how to weigh * Good instruction and assessment integrate, rather
the various criteria for assessing giftedness. In our view, than separate, all of the elements of intelligence.
the assessments are of roughly equal importance, and we All students receive all kinds ofinstruction (analytical,
suspect little would be gained by a weighting scheme. But, creative, and practical). Such instruction helps students
we do not at the present time have data to bear out this capitalize on strengths and correct or compensate for
claim. weaknesses.
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d. Suppose (1)Johnny Tremaine fought for the British tion, at various times, of all seven of the metacomponents
(How might the story have ended?); (2) mathe- of the problem-solving cycle: (a) problem identification,
matics had not been invented (How would our (b) problem definition, (c) formulation of problem-solv-
world be changed?); (3) the ozone layer becomes ing strategies, (d) formulation of mental and external rep-
depleted (What changes can we then expect?) resentations and organizations of problems and their
3. For emphasis on practical thinking: associated information, (e) allocation of resources, (f)
a. Use (1) a lesson from Treasure Island in your own monitoring of problem solving, and (g) evaluation of
life; (2) principles of compound interest to deter- problem solving.
mine how much money you would make if you Instruction should also involve utilization, at various
placed a certain amount of money in a savings times, of at least six performance components, including
account at a given rate of interest; (3) what you (a) encoding of information, (b) inference of relations
know about the speed of sound to discuss prob- between chunks of information, (c) mapping of higher
lems with supersonic transport. order relations among relations, (d) application of infor-
b. Apply (1) your knowledge of phonics to sound mation and relations between chunks of information, (e)
out a new word, such as exacerbate; (2) your comparison of alternatives, and (f) response.
knowledge of arithmetic to compute how much Finally, instruction should involve utilization, at vari-
more you will have to pay for front-section seats ous times, of at least three knowledge-acquisition compo-
than for back-section seats to a football game; (3) nents, including (a) selective encoding (distinguishing
what you learned about testing water to the water relevant from irrelevant information), (b) selective com-
in your own home. parison (relating old information to new information), and
c. Implement (1) a practical plan for improving your (c) selective combination (putting together disparate
understanding ofdifficult texts (e.g., seeking main pieces of information to reach a conclusion).
ideas, summarizing, etc.); (2) the Pythagorean Optimal instruction is in the zones of (a) relative nov-
theorem in figuring out how much time you will elty and (b) automatization for the individual. What is rel-
save by taking a route to a destination that is a atively novel or ready for automatization differs from one
hypotenuse of a triangle; (3) what you know about individual to another.
nutrition by designing a menu for a week that is Processes always act on mental representations.
nutritious and that you would be able to follow. Instruction and assessment should take into account indi-
d. Put into Practice (1) Tom Sawyer's persuasion tech- vidual differences in preferred mental representations,
nique for convincing people to do things that they including verbal, quantitative, and figural, as well as
might otherwise not want to do (e.g., whitewash- modalities for input (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and out-
ing a fence); (2) what you have learned about per- put (written, oral, performance-based).
centages to figure out what the discount is on an Does the theory result in improved instructional outcomes?
item of sale merchandise (such as a portable radio); Just as many theories in the gifted education field lack
(3) what you know about nitrates and nitrites to solid empirical support, so too many theories used as the
decide whether you want to buy foods with high basis for instructional intervention have little or no solid
levels of these substances as preservatives. and peer-reviewed empirical data showing that they work
Teaching for successful intelligence also involves stan- in the classroom. Teachers' satisfaction with programs
dard teaching for memory, with prompts, such as (a) recall based on the theories or even students' satisfaction with
(e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how), (b) summarize, (c) such programs are important, but do not in themselves
recognize, (d) choosefrom among the options, (e) list, and (f) identify. constitute solid empirical support. Teachers or students
In scoring materials, we devise rubrics that are appro- may enjoy a program that does not, in fact, produce better
priate to the subject matter and grade level being assessed. outcomes than conventional programs or even satisfactory
There is no one generalized rubric that will apply to all instructional outcomes.
kinds of products because different products require dif- In one set of studies, we explored the question of
ferent knowledge and skills. Thus, although we work with whether conventional education in school systematically
teachers to formulate rubrics, neither we nor anyone else discriminates against children with creative and practical
can provide a "one-size-fits all" rubric. strengths (Sternberg & Clinkenbeard, 1995; Sternberg,
Processes to be developed through teaching for successful intel- Ferrari, Clinkenbeard, & Grigorenko, 1996; Sternberg,
ligence. Instruction and assessment should involve utiliza- Grigorenko, Ferrari, & Clinkenbeard, 1999). Motivating
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this work was the belief that the systems in schools We found that all three ability tests-analytical, creative,
strongly tend to favor children with strengths in memory and practical-significantly predicted course performance.
and analytical abilities. When multiple-regression analysis was used, at least two of
We used the Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test, as these ability measures contributed significantly to the predic-
described above. The test was administered to 326 chil- tion of each of the measures of achievement. Perhaps as a
dren around the United States and in some other countries reflection of the difficulty of de-emphasizing the analytical
who were identified by their high schools as gifted by any way of teaching, one of the significant predictors was always
standard. Children were selected for a summer program in the analytical score. However, in a replication of our study
(college-level) psychology if they fell into one of five abil- with low-income African American students from New
ity groupings: high analytical, high creative, high practical, York, Deborah Coates of the City University of New York
high balanced (high in all three abilities), or low balanced found a different pattern of results. Her data indicated that
(low in all three abilities). Students who came to Yale were the practical tests were better predictors of course perform-
then divided into four instructional groups. Students in all ance than were the analytical measures, suggesting that what
four instructional groups used the same introductory-psy- ability test predicts what criteria depends on both population
chology textbook (a preliminary version of Sternberg and mode of teaching. Most importantly, there was an apti-
[1995]) and listened to the same psychology lectures. What tude-treatment interaction whereby students who were
differed among them was the type of afternoon discussion placed in instructional conditions that better matched their
section to which they were assigned. They were assigned pattern of abilities outperformed students who were mis-
to an instructional condition that emphasized memory, matched (Sternberg, Ferrari, Clinkenbeard, & Grigorenko,
analytical, creative, or practical instruction. For example, 1996). In other words, when students are taught in a way that
in the memory condition, they might be asked to describe fits how they think, they do better in school. Children with
the main tenets of a major theory of depression. In the creative and practical abilities, who are almost never taught or
analytical condition, they might be asked to compare and assessed in a way that matches their pattern of abilities, may
contrast two theories of depression. In the creative condi- be at a disadvantage in course after course, year after year.
tion, they might be asked to formulate their own theory of In a follow-up study (Sternberg, Torff, & Grigorenko,
depression. In the practical condition, they might be asked 1998a, 1998b), we looked at learning of social studies and
how they could use what they had learned about depres- science by third graders and eighth graders. The 225 third
sion to help a friend who was depressed. graders were students in a very low-income neighborhood
Students in all four instructional conditions were eval- in Raleigh, North Carolina. The 142 eighth graders were
uated in terms of their performance on homework, a students who were largely middle to upper-middle class
midterm exam, a final exam, and an independent project. studying in Baltimore, Maryland, and Fresno, California.
Each type of work was evaluated for memory, analytical, In this study, students were assigned to one of three
creative, and practical quality. Thus, all students were eval- instructional conditions. In the first condition, they were
uated in exactly the same way. taught the course that basically they would have learned
Our results suggested the utility of the theory of suc- had we not intervened. The emphasis in the course was on
cessful intelligence. First, we observed when the students memory. In a second condition, they were taught in a way
arrived at Yale that the students in the high creative and that emphasized critical (analytical) thinking. In the third
high practical groups were much more diverse in terms of condition, they were taught in a way that emphasized ana-
racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and educational back- lytical, creative, and practical thinking. All students' per-
grounds than were the students in the high-analytical formances were assessed for memory learning (through
group, suggesting that correlations of measured intelli- multiple-choice assessments) and analytical, creative, and
gence with status variables such as these may be reduced by practical learning (through performance assessments).
using a broader conception ofintelligence. Thus, the kinds As expected, we found that students in the successful-
of students identified as strong differed in terms ofpopula- intelligence (analytical, creative, practical) condition out-
tions from which they were drawn in comparison with stu- performed the other students in terms of the performance
dents identified as strong solely by analytical measures. assessments. One could argue that this result merely
More importantly, just by expanding the range of abilities reflected the way they were taught. Nevertheless, the
we measured, we discovered intellectual strengths that result suggested that teaching for these kinds of thinking
might not have been apparent through a conventional test succeeded. More important, however, was the result that
(Sternberg, Ferrari, Clinkenbeard, & Grigorenko, 1996). children in the successful-intelligence condition outper-
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formed the other children even on the multiple-choice skills are not needed by everyone and, therefore, are perhaps
memory tests. In other words, to the extent that one's goal better viewed in the realm of talents.
is just to maximize children's memory for information, Statewide tests only measure memory and, to some extent, ana-
teaching for successful intelligence is still superior. It lytical thinking. Therefore, teachingfor creative andpractical skills can
enables children to capitalize on their strengths and to cor- be sef-defeating. Our data as described above show that teach-
rect or to compensate for their weaknesses, and it allows ing for successful intelligence improves achievement relative
children to encode material in a variety of interesting ways. to conventional instruction and instruction for critical think-
We have now extended these results to reading cur- ing pretty much without regard to how that achievement is
ricula at the middle school and the high school level. In a measured. Students instructed for successful intelligence even
study of 809 middle school students and 432 high school do better on memory tests than do students instructed in
students, we taught reading either for successful intelli- alternative ways. The instruction works successfully across
gence or through the regular curriculum. At the middle grade levels and subject-matter areas. There are several rea-
school level, reading was taught explicitly. At the high sons why the instruction is particularly effective. It enables
school level, reading was infused into instruction in math- students to learn material in multiple ways (analytically, cre-
ematics, physical sciences, social sciences, English, history, atively, and practically), so that the material is more easily
foreign languages, and the arts. In all settings, students retrieved later on. It enables students to capitalize on strengths
who were taught for successful intelligence substantially and to correct or compensate for weaknesses in their learning,
outperformed students who were taught in standard ways so that they learn more. And the instruction simply is more
(Sternberg, Grigorenko, &Jarvin, 2001). motivating to students and teachers alike, increasing the
effectiveness of the learning/teaching process.
Obstacles to the Use There is no standardized testfor successful intelligence, whereas
of the Theory ofSuccessful Intelligence there are standardized testsforgeneral intelligence (g). Testing has
driven the agenda for gifted (and other forms of) education
When any new proposal is made for gifted education for so long that gifted educators have sometimes forgotten
(or any other form of education), there are always poten- that testing should be in the service of an educational
tial objections to its use. VWhat are some ofthe main objec- agenda, rather than the educational agenda being in the
tions and our responses to them? service of testing. We have pilot tests, mentioned above, that
True gftedness is a function ofgeneral intelligence, not of suc- we use in our research, and we are working (for the second
cessful intelligence (or other kinds of intelligence proposed in recent time) with a testing company to produce standardized
theories). We have been asked many times what we believe measures. However, tests are not a panacea, whether they
giftedness "really" is. This question presupposes that gifted- are our tests or someone else's. Standardized tests can be
ness really is something. It is not. It is a societal invention. used in conjunction with products, projects, and portfolios
What constitutes giftedness in a hunting and gathering cul- that show children's analytical, creative, and practical skills.
ture will differ from what constitutes giftedness in modern Teaching and assessing for successful intelligence requires a
society. In a preliterate society, superior skills for reading will whole new set of skills, which teachers of the gifted cannot be
have no bearing on giftedness because no one reads. Each expected to have acquired. On the contrary, we believe that the
society invents giftedness as a label to reward those who do skills are ones that all good teachers have, but often are
particularly well in whatever the society values. They may be afraid to use. There is no teaching technique that we rec-
especially strong in solving abstract, school-like problems, be ommend (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2000) that will be
especially creative, be especially good in following orders, be totally alien to any good teacher. Rather, teachers are so
(seemingly) exceptionally strong in magical skills, or what- often rewarded for teaching only for memory and occa-
ever. Giftedness is not a single thing. It is what we make it sionally for analytical skills that they cease using their full
out to be. Creative and practical skills are at least as relevant repertoire of teaching skills. We work with a charter school,
for success in many societies today as are memory and ana- the Sanger Academy in Sanger, California, based on the
lytical skills. The rapid change in the world renders creative theory of successful intelligence. The teachers have, for the
flexibility a key to survival (as many businesses find out most part, ordinary backgrounds in teaching. What makes
every day), and the need to adapt to, shape, and select envi- them successful is some knowledge about the theory of
ronments renders practical skills always important. The label successful intelligence and how to apply it, but even more,
ofgfftedness, therefore, should take into account creative and their dedication and drive in realizing the model for
practical skills because everyone needs them. Other kinds of instruction and assessment in their classrooms.
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Sternberg, R. J. (1999b). Successful intelligence: Finding a bal- End Note
ance. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 436-442.
Sternberg, R. J. (1999c). The theory of successful intelligence. 1. Note that, because we view all tests of abilities as tests
Review of General Psychology, 3, 292-316. of developing expertise, tests of abilities inevitably meas-
Sternberg, R. J., Castejon, J. L., Prieto, M. D., Hautamiki, J., & ure both achievement and abilities. It is impossible to sep-
Grigorenko, E. L. (2001). Confirmatory factor analysis of arate the two kinds of measures cleanly.
the Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test in three international
samples: An empirical test of the triarchic theory of intelli-
gence. EuropeanJournal of Psychological Assessment 17, 1-16. Author Note
Sternberg, R. J., & Clinkenbeard, P. R. (1995). A triarchic
model of identifying, teaching, and assessing gifted children.
Preparation of this article was supported by Grant
Roeper Review, 17, 255-260.
Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.). (1984). Conceptions of REC-9979843 from the National Science Foundation
gftedness. New York: Cambridge University Press. and by a government grant under the Javits Act Program
Sternberg, R. J., Ferrari, M., Clinkenbeard, P. R., & (Grant No. R206R000001) as administered by the Office
Grigorenko, E. L. (1996). Identification, instruction, and of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S.
assessment of gifted children: A construct validation of a tri- Department of Education. Grantees undertaking such
archic model. Gifted Child Quarterly, 40, 129-137. projects are encouraged to express freely their professional
Sternberg, R. J., Forsythe, G. B., Hedlund, J., Horvath, J., judgment. This article, therefore, does not necessarily rep-
Snook, S., Williams, W. M., Wagner, R. K., & resent the positions or the policies of the U.S. govern-
Grigorenko, E. L. (2000). Practical intelligence in everyday ment, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Information about the Sanger Academy, which uses the
Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (Eds.). (1997). Intelligence, successful-intelligence model, can be obtained from
heredity, and environment. New York: Cambridge University Kenneth Garcia, Principal, Sanger Academy, 1905
Press.
Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (2000). Teachingfor success- Seventh St., Sanger, CA 93657. Requests for information
ful intelligence. Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight Training and should be sent to Robert J. Sternberg, Director, Yale
Publishing. Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and
Sternberg, R. J., Grigorenko, E. L., Ferrari, M., & Expertise, Yale University, P.O. Box 208358, New
Clinkenbeard, P. (1999). A triarchic analysis of an aptitude- Haven, CT 06520-8358.
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