Skip to main content

B.Ed. Notes - Guilford’s Structure of Intellect


Joy Paul Guilford was a US psychologist, best remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the important distinction between convergent and divergent production. His "Structure of Intellect" model organized these various abilities along three dimensions: content, product, and process. He sought to develop tests for each combination of the possibilities on these three dimensions, expecting that a person could be high on some of these abilities while being low on others. According to him, Intelligence depends on:
  • Mental operations (process of thinking)
  • Content (what we think about)
  • Product (result of our thinking)

By Content he meant that different people seemed to pay more attention to and think more effectively about different kinds of information. There are 5 kinds of Contents
  1. Visual - Information perceived through seeing
  2. Auditory - Information perceived through hearing.
  3. Symbolic content - arbitrary signs such as numbers or codes
  4. Semantic content - word meanings
  5. Behavioral content - nonverbal information involved in human interaction such as emotion


The Products dimension relates to the kinds of information we process from the content types. There are 6 kinds of Products
  1. Units refer to the ability to perceive units in a content area. This might be symbolic units such as words, visual units such as shapes, or behavioral units such as facial expressions.
  2. Classes refers to the ability to organize units into meaningful groups and to sort units into the right groups.
  3. Relations pertains to the ability to sense the relationships between pairs of units.
  4. Systems consist of the relationships among more than two units.
  5. Transformations is the ability to understand changes in information, such as rotation of visual figures, or jokes and puns in the semantic area.
  6. Implications refers to expectation. Given a certain set of information, one might expect certain other information to be true.

The Operations dimension describes what the brain does with and to these types of information. There are 5 kinds of Operations
  1. Cognition = knowing, discovering, being aware
  2. Memory = retrieving information
  3. Divergent thinking = generating multiple responses or decisions
  4. Convergent thinking = reducing information to one single accepted solution
  5. Evaluation = judging the appropriateness of information

These three factors combine to identify 150 different skills. i.e 5 x 6 x 5 =150 distinct mental abilities Guilford’s Structure of Intellect can be diagrammatically shown as:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sheldon's Theory of Personality (Type Theory)

Intro In the 1940's, William Herbert Sheldon associated body types with human temperament types. He claimed that a body type could be linked with the personality of that person. He says that a fat person with a large bone structure tends to have an outgoing and more relaxed personality while a more muscular body typed person is more active and aggressive. A slim or scrawny person with thin muscles is usually characterized as quiet or fragile. He split up these body/personality types into three categories called somatotypes. Endomorphic An Endomorphic somatotype is also known as a viscerotonic. The characteristic traits of this somatotype usually includes being relaxed, tolerant, comfortable, and sociable. Psychologically, they are also fun loving, good humored,even tempered, and they love food and affection. The Endomorph is physically "round". They have wide hips and narrow shoulders that give a pear shape. They tend to have a lot of extra fat on their body a...
2 comments
Read more

Deficit Theory (Eller, 1989)

The Deficit Theory attempts to explain why certain disadvantaged students show a high failure rate in school. These students coming from socio-economically disadvantaged homes, show a lack of verbal stimulation and entered school without the necessary linguistic resources for success. These children, labelled verbally deficient may actually be highly competent language user, however they do not find themselves in situations where they are able to demonstrate their specific language competence. When a child is in the presence of an authority figure of a different social class, he or she tends to be more introverted. An important consideration for those working with high school students is to realize that one vernacular (language) is not inherently superior to another. Such understanding will enhance a students' desire to develop during there years of critical language growth. In an attempt to explain deficiencies in lower socioeconomic students’ success rate, some researc...
21 comments
Read more

B.Ed Notes - Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory

  Gardner's Definition of Intelligence   The human ability to solve problems or to make something that is valued in one or more cultures. The theory of multiple intelligence is Howard Gardner’s theory that proposes: That people are not born with all of the intelligence they will ever have. It says that intelligence can be learned throughout life. Claims that everyone is intelligent in at least nine different ways and can develop each aspect of intelligence to an average level of competency. Intelligence, as defined by Gardner, is the ability to solve problems or fashion products that are valuable in one or more cultural settings. The 9 intelligences included in Gardner’s theory are: Verbal/ Linguistic Visual/ Spatial Interpersonal Musical/ Rhythmic Logical/ Mathematical Intrapersonal Bodily/ Kinesthetic Naturalist Existentialist Principles of Multiple Intelligence Theory: Intelligence is not singular: intelligences are multiple. Ever...
2 comments
Read more