Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles

One of the criticisms of mainstream education is that it often doesn’t cater for the ‘fact’ that students have different “intelligences” or that they have preferred “learning styles”.

When we think about intelligence the first thing that is likely to cross our mind is IQ. The existence of metrics like IQ presume that there is a single attribute that people have that determines their overall cognitive ability.

However, we intuitively know that people are a very diverse bunch: we vary in our attitudes, our interests, our personalities and all of these traits impact on how well we learn. But does that mean that we all have a different spectrum of intelligences? Yes, and no, because intelligence is a word that is not easy to define and not easy to quantify. Furthermore, there is no definitive list of the possible intelligences that humans can possess. Indeed, the inventor of multiple intelligence theory, Howard Gardner, has stated: “I readily admit that the theory is no longer current. Several fields of knowledge have advanced significantly since the early 1980s, and I am no longer wedded to the particular list of intelligences that I initially developed.”

Regardless of Gardner’s own misgivings and the general lack of empirical evidence for theories of multiple intelligences, you’d have to admit that there is some ‘truth’ to the idea. People have different interests and aptitudes (natural/genetic or acquired), and different personality traits; and all of these factors affect how well they learn new material. Traditional exam-driven systems obviously suit people who score highly on the personality trait, conscientiousness. Exam systems are also likely to be highly stressful for people who score highly on the character trait, neuroticism. The playing field is never really level.

So in a truly equitable world, shouldn’t we design an education system that accommodates everyone’s individual interests, aptitudes and personality traits? Shouldn’t we design assessments that place equal value on different intelligences – like Gardner’s “intrapersonal intelligence” or, perhaps, creativity? Maybe, but we have no idea how to asses these ‘intelligences’ in a robust, fair and transparent way; at least not yet. Robust and fair assessment is a basic requirement of any education system.

Much of the thinking around multiple intelligences is well-intentioned idea but it depends on one very insidious idea and that is that our abilities and our personalities are fixed. Attempting to tailor education to suit the supposedly individual needs and likes of students carries with it a big risk of pigeonholing them. This is one of the problems in the German and Finnish systems where young people are put into academic/non-academic boxes at an early age. Let’s think of creativity as an example of an intelligence. Numerous reports produced over the years by Enterprise Ireland have shown that the majority of entrepreneurs have a tertiary education and many have PhDs. These are examples of creativity emerging from knowledge acquired through conventional education. Furthermore, as the world becomes more technologically advanced, creativity is going to depend more and more on having relevant, cutting-edge knowledge. So to characterise a young student as creative or non-creative at an early age is a big mistake.

A similar argument can be made against the Learning Styles concept. The core idea behind learning styles theory is that students learn better when taught in a way that matches their preferred learning style where that learning style is usually determined by a highly subjective self-administered questionnaire. There is no solid research to support the learning style concept and no serious educator takes the idea seriously any more. But people tend to still believe in the idea for the same reason as they believe in multiple intelligences: human beings differ. But while differing in some respects, human are also very similar, especially in how they operate cognitively, and the current consensus is that for the vast majority of students, there is a best way to teach a topic and that best way is determined by the nature of the content in question. Trying to teach topics in a way that suits every supposed learning style would lead to ludicrous outcomes like trying to teach map-reading (inherently visual) through dance (for so-called kinaesthetic learners).

In my own teaching I often need to show students how to solve simultaneous equations. I can do in this in a purely abstract/algebraic way or I can do it geometrically – the solution to two equations can be interpreted as the point of intersection of two curves. Invariably I find that students find the geometrical interpretation more difficult so I nearly always focus on the algebraic approach. And my experience is that if I present multiple ways of solving problems – as learning styles theory suggests I should – students end up confused.

So what to do? Should we revolutionises the education system so that it accommodates every students particular characteristics as they are at a single point in time when the student’s life experience is limited? Of course not – traditional education has endured for over a hundred years and has improved the lives of millions of people all over the world. Education as we know it drove the remarkable developments of the 20^th century, and continues to do so in the 21^st century; so we need to tread cautiously.

But introducing more diversity into the way we assess students is probably a good thing and certainly no harm. Assessment at third level is now very diverse – there is far less emphasis on final exams – but one thing has struck me from doing tons of stats over the years: marks in different assessments tend to be correlated. ‘Strong’ students tend to do well no matter how they are assessed; weaker ones tend to perform less well across the board. Of course, there are exceptions and the data will always have some scatter but the way we assess academic ability these days is pretty robust in my view.

Does the Leaving prepare students for third level

I’m sure I’ve written about his before but I’m returning to it today because is has come up on social media today.

Here’s the context: many academics bemoan the ‘fact’ that students arrive in college unprepared for the challenges that await them. By all accounts, incoming students cannot think critically and they rely way too much on rote learning. These claims are typically followed by suggestions that the Leaving Cert needs to focus a lot more on critical thinking, evidence-based analysis and argument construction, the presumption being that these skills are not required in the current Leaving Cert – something that is highly debatable. There is also a strong sense that academics, rather bizarrely, resent the fact that they have to inculcate these “skills” in incoming students – rather like employers complaining that graduates do not possess workplace skills like business acumen, marketing etc.

Let’s first about critical thinking. As cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, has pointed out, even toddlers can think critically in certain circumstances while experts can often fail to think critically. Critical thinking is not a thing that once you’re trained in, you do forever more. In the context of education, if you want students to think critically, you should design assignments and assessments that demand critical thinking and where critical thinking is absent, you should provide feedback to explain precisely what critical thinking is within the context of the relevant discipline. That’s our job at third level. If second level was the same as third level, why would we have ‘levels’ at all?

Second level is a bit more tricky because fairness and transparency are inextricably linked. Students, parents and all sorts of stakeholders believe strongly that students should be absolutely clear as to what is expected of them if they want to achieve a certain grade. There is so much at stake that the  unexpected is seen as unfair. However, if you really want to ensure that students place less emphasis on ‘rote learning’ then you have to design assessments that demand critical thinking. In this context, we can define critical thinking as the ability to analyse situations or solve problems that students have not encountered before. Thus students would have to link knowledge that exists in their long-term memory (yes, you do need to remember stuff) to solve those problems or analyses those situations. So when people suggest that the Leaving Cert needs to place more emphasis on critical thinking, they are, in fact, suggesting that the Leaving Cert should be made harder and perhaps that marking schemes should be loosened somewhat. Advocates of Leaving Cert reform should acknowledge that.

The Leaving Cert is currently a knowledge-rich, highly demanding curriculum that requires a strong work ethic, a decent level of all-round intelligence and an ability to communicate. It provides students with a strong basis on which to take on third level. But it doesn’t produce third level-ready students just as university does not necessarily produce work-ready graduates. Just as employers need to accept that they need to provide incoming graduates with further training, we need to accept that we need to provide ‘training’ in the ways of third level education. It’s not a big deal and we shouldn’t be moaning about it. After all we have four years.

There is one more important point. Many students choose to study subjects at university that they have never studied in school. They have zero knowledge of their chosen subject. The idea that students who know very little about their chosen subject should be somehow able to think critically about that subject goes against everything we know about how students learn. The ability to think critically depends crucially on having relevant domain knowledge, including knowledge of the culture and norms of the discipline that they have chosen to study. Evidence in law, for example, is quite different from evidence in science; argument-construction in theology is likely to be quite different from that employed in, say, logic or even philosophy.

We need to stop blaming the Leaving and focus on ensuring that our own house is in order

The Leaving Cert and anti-intellectualism

In Ireland, this is the day when every punter who has ever been to school and thinks they know a thing or two about education, appears out of the woodwork to give their tuppence worth on the Leaving Cert. I hate it but I can’t stop myself getting involved in pointless debates on Twitter.

The tweets I hate the most are the ones that make the totally unsubstantiated accusation that persons unknown judge the “worth” of a student on the basis of their Leaving Cert results. Who are these people? I’ve never met anyone in the education ‘business’ who judges students, in a holistic sense, on the basis of their exam results. In fact, as a general rule I would say that the students we admire the most are the grafters, the ones who get that 2.1 through sheer hard work; or the emotionally intelligent ones who say “thank you” after a lecture or the few who give you that small gift at the end of their final year project. We all know what exams are: they’re an imperfect test of a student’s knowledge at a given point in time but they are by-and-large a reasonable test of academic ability and academic work ethic. That’s all.

The second type of tweet that I hate are the “I got 37 points and now I have my own business, employ thousands of people, and live in Foxrock with a nice yacht in Dun Laoghaire”. These tweets ignore the blatantly obvious fact that although it is possible to succeed in life without succeeding in education, succeeding in education opens so may doors that to say it is not important to do so is to exist in a state of denial. It’s a simple matter of statistics. Just as smoking makes it far more likely that you will get cancer, having a good education makes it far more likely that you will live a happy and healthy life with a good income.

But in Ireland, we have this odd attitude to success in education. The Leaving Cert is dismissed as nothing more than an exercise in “regurgitation”. If you do well in it it’s because you only have a certain “type of intelligence”. A few years ago celebrity economist, David McWilliams, even went so far as to blame the financial crisis on the Leaving Cert! Celebrity education gurus, like Sir Ken Robinson, claim that academic achievement is inconsistent with creativity despite the fact that the vast majority of entrepreneurs these days have at least a tertiary education while many have PhDs.

The contrast with our views on sport is stark. While we love the sportsperson who can perform under pressure – the Roy Keanes of this world – we say nothing good about the student who can perform under the pressure of an exam. Instead we focus on how unfair and stressful exams are. Whereas our sports commentators focus incessantly on player’s “character”, we never use such words when it comes to education. We’re far more likely to put student success don’t to ‘cheating’ in the form of attending grind schools.

There is a strong anti-intellectual streak in Ireland and it rears its head at regular times during the year. This is one of those times.