Defining Intelligence

How many times have you used the word smart to describe students in your classrooms, wondering if they might be just a bit smarter than you or at least may become so sooner than you would like? What do we mean by smart? Does it mean intelligent, witty, creative, or just clever? It may well be just the ability to adapt to one’s environment as in street smart. Does smart mean the same thing as intelligent? Cleverness may refer to the ability to cleverly adapt to changing circumstances.

There seem to be great differences in interpretation among all these words. There is little consensus among professionals on an operative definition of intelligence. For example, when two dozen prominent theorists from the American Psychological Association were asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen different definitions (1995). The concept is wide open to interpretation. We who are educators should understand some basics. For the sake of the intellectual rigor that upholds our profession, let’s explore the intelligence dilemma together and examine three prominent theories explained by Rafi Feuerstein (1997).


Theory One: Cast Building
It has long been held that there is a measurable general intelligence factor common to all people. Intelligence quotients (IQ’s) have been widely used in educational, business, and military settings. This first theory assumes that there is one basic factor responsible for thinking, or a general mental energy known as “g.” This one factor “g” is presumed to be related to all thinking abilities. Because of its rigidity, this theory could be referred to as “cast building,” as in building a concrete wall. Intelligence is seen as a global capability that
causes an individual to respond similarly in all situations, or to all concepts or ideas. Those holding to this theory conclude that intellectual capacity is a relatively easy thing to measure and one that remains fairly consistent across an individual’s lifetime. Is this your belief?

Theory Two: Brick Building
A second theory is a bit more flexible. Rather than cast building, it could be described as brick building. This theory refers to intelligence that has a number of factors responsible for various thinking abilities, and these factors are separate from one another, like bricks in a wall. Separation is due to the content involved in the thinking processes, as in Gardner’s (1993) multiple intelligences theory.

This separation of process and content implies different ways of thinking relative to different subject areas. For example, you may have a spatial intelligence that helps you design buildings and find your way in a strange city but not be able to read very well. A problem, according to Feuerstein, in considering intellectual ability as separate areas, or “bricks,” is that one area of intellectual competence presumably has nothing to do with any other areas of cognitive strength or weakness. That is, this second theory presumes that the systems that support the ability to design a building or read a book have no overlap. Nevertheless, it does introduce some flexibility into the intelligence dilemma. Have you landed on a specific position yet? Can you be supersmart in one area and really dumb in another? Or are there supporting systems such as flexibility of thinking that underlie both?

Theory Three: Mosaic Model
A third theory could be called the mosaic model. This model resembles a colorful, creatively designed mosaic tile as opposed to a concrete or brick wall. The theory is more flexible than the cast building theory and more general than the brick building one. The mosaic model integrates the features of the other two by proposing:
• Intelligence is built from many factors within an individual, both cognitive and experiential.
• These many factors are general and can be related to all cognitive behaviors (like designing or reading).
• Intelligence can be described as either fluid or crystallized (Cattell, 1987).

You could picture fluid intelligence as being the background on which the mosaic tiles are placed. Fluid intelligence consists of thinking strategies that are separate from the content being learned. In other words, it is how one thinks, not what. Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the specific knowledge learned by the individual or the content or body of knowledge that the individual has mastered. It is the mosaic tiles themselves that represent functional cognitive systems.

In other words, this theory assumes intelligence that is separate from the knowledge learned or content measured by many IQ tests. Fluid intelligence the how to learn—can cross over into many content areas and is open to constructive change. For example, strengthening visual processing could contribute to greater fluency in reading, thereby improving comprehension skills. In fact, improvement in fluid intelligence can contribute to content mastery or crystallization of knowledge. This is great news for all educators. It means that limits that were previously set now have a skylight—a window in the ceiling formerly imposed by intelligence predictions.

Let’s return to our skylight analogy. According to Holmes (1993), there are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. Those who only collect facts are one-story individuals. Two-story individuals compare, reason, and generalize, based on the facts of the fact collectors. Three-story individuals idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. If we can begin to understand that intelligence is wonderfully open to change throughout a lifetime and that, as teachers, we can influence intellectual development though our teaching, then the how to learn will take new priority over the what.
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Relevant Instruction Definition

First, the use of the “ relevance ” disclaimer is absolutely necessary because there are obviously circumstances under which no amount of instruction will produce any learning at all. I’ve already provided a purposefully absurd example of this in the form of instruction being delivered in a language unfamiliar to the learner, but even the classic learning total-time hypothesis eluded to earlier involving paired-associate learning (which is infi nitely more controlled than classroom learning) found it necessary to include a relevance-like disclaimer that is quite apropos to its use here.

But, in classroom learning, “relevance” is an unavoidably broad concept. To illustrate what is and is not meant by “relevant instruction,” let’s consider the following scenario: Assume the existence of two comparable classrooms (i.e., comparable with respect to the ability levels of the students and the skill of the teachers) that were taught the same instructional unit using the same pedagogical approach. Classroom A, however, received 30 minutes of instruction, while Classroom B received 60 minutes. Given our three determinants of school learning just advanced, we would predict the following results:

• The students in Classroom B would learn more than the students in Classroom A because they received more instruction. (Not twice as much, perhaps, but we do know that Classroom B students should learn more .) 
• Some students (whose identity we could predict based upon such things as previous test scores or their parents’ educational attainment) would learn more than others in both Classroom A and Classroom B. 4 (We’ve called this “propensity to learn,” which we’ll explicitly define shortly.)
• The identity of these children with greater and lesser propensities to learn will generally remain constant over time (given what we know about aptitude-by-treatment interactions and the voluminous research involving longitudinal test scores).

Now, let’s look at the concept of “relevance” within the context of these two classrooms. The easiest way to defi ne the term is to describe the conditions under which the learning occurring in Classroom B would not

exceed the learning occurring in Classroom A (or the difference would not be as great as expected). Consider, therefore, the following scenarios:

• • A large proportion of the students in both classrooms already know the instructional content. In a typical classroom, the teacher very seldom has the time or expertise to ascertain who does and does not know a particular topic or its component parts. Thus, the instruction will be relevant only to those students who have not mastered the topic; for those who have already learned it, the instruction will be irrelevant . A huge advantage of the use of instructional tests based upon explicit objectives (remember Popham’s work) is their ability to facilitate (a) the identification of subject matter that has already been mastered by almost everyone and hence does not need to be taught, and (b) the individualization of instruction (which by definition increases its relevance).
• The instructional content is too difficult for a large proportion of the students. This can occur if these students have not mastered prerequisite concepts. An obvious example is if these students’ reading level is below that at which their textbooks (or other instructional materials) have been written.
• The classrooms are too disruptive for students to attend to the instruction. If students can’t hear (or concentrate on) instruction, it will not result in learning and therefore will not be relevant.
• The two teachers involved aren’t exactly clear about what they are supposed to teach, hence they teach content that was not mandated and is not contained on the tests used to evaluate either learning or teaching. (Another advantage of explicit instructional objectives and tests keyed to them.)
• The teachers do not conscientiously teach the appropriate content (e.g., through laziness, a tendency to digress or teach other content, lack of sufficient knowledge about the particular content to teach it, and so on).
• The instruction is diluted by the teachers’ reliance upon time consuming games or hands-on activities that are inefficient as compared to direct instruction.
• The test used to assess the amount learned is not explicitly based upon the instructional content and nothing but that content. (All commercial tests pretty much fall into this category). Tests that do not assess learning are a huge problem for schools, and their use makes classroom instruction even more inefficient and ineffective.

And, of course, all of this assumes that the extra instructional time available in Classroom B is actually devoted to instruction and isn’t given over to noninstructional time-wasting activities. Defined more explicitly, then, relevant instruction is instruction that can be understood, attended to, and involves topics that have not already been learned and that are mandated by the curriculum (which assumes the existence of tests that match the curriculum as well).
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