me: > > Please _tell me_ why you think that theories of cognition are as bad > > as phlogiston theory. Why, specifically, do you reject the idea of > > multiple intelligences?
Michael Smith wrote: > Cart before the horse. I'm not "rejecting" anything -- just > taking the Missourian stance: I gotta be shown. ask Howard Gardner or examine his research. > IIRC you originally asserted that it was > pedagogically helpful to have this sevenfold way of defining > intelligence. I wanted to know how. I'm open > to conviction, though admittedly skeptical. I'm not a very good teacher (since my social skills are abysmal), but I'm working on an idea to replace the current system of grading that we use. I like the old UC-Santa Cruz with no grades at all (being replaced by professor comments) but it seems extremely costly to implement, i.e., it involves too much professor-hours. The burden on profs encourages "boiler plate" comments, which gets us back toward the original system of grades. That means that the UC-SC plan is self-defeating. Worse, grad schools insist on seeing grades. My idea is that grades should be multidimensional, following Gardner's 7-fold way. Note: I see the main role of grades as being communicating with students (such things as "do you really want to major in Econ?") rather than as a reward/punishment system. Working at a liberal arts college, I think that we should reject G's "bodily-kinesthetic intelligence" because that's not what this place is about. So that leaves six criteria for grades. My idea is that the faculty (perhaps with some input from the administration) could winnow out any additional brands of intelligence that seem irrelevant to our mission. (Maybe bodily-kinesthetic intelligence might be brought in, if the Dance people insist. My prejudice might easily be wrong.) Then each of the University's sub-colleges' faculties would either agree to that list or winnow it some more. Next, each department would choose two or three criteria for grading that would fit its goals (because these are numbers that are easy to digest). Then in each of our classes, the prof would assign each student two or three grades. At each stage, democratic decisions by the faculty should be crucial, keeping long-term goals in mind. In Econ, I guess there would be grades for (1) linguistic intelligence and (2) logical-mathematical intelligence. A student might be good at communicating, but not at analytical thinking, so might receive an A and and a C, for example. This would communicate more to the student than a B (the average of the two) would. This means that each student would have six or seven different grade-point averages. It's true that at the end, graduate students could -- and would likely -- simply average these GPAs. But the grading process would involve much more communication to the students. I think that this is highly superior to a single-grade system, which doesn't communicate very much. It was inspired and informed by Gardner's theory. -- Jim Devine / "The trick for radicals has been and will be to make of earth a heaven, but without blind faith." -- Mike Yates.
