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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:


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