Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized is the title of Robert J. Sternberg’s book on a synthesized approach to intelligence and school-teaching.
Sternberg outlines the development of theories of intelligence, summarizing the findings of Galton, Binet, Spearman, Thurston, Guilford, etc.
His approach is to find a synthesis of intelligenc, creativity and wisdom, starting with his theory of Successful Intelligence.
Here is an excerpt taken from the pages 42 – 46.
Definitions
- Intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to achieve success in life in terms of one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context.
- One’s ability to achieve success depends on capitalizing on one’s strenths and correcting or compensating for one’s weaknesses.
- Balancing abilities is achieved in order to adapt to, shape and select environments.
- Success is attained through a balance of analytical, creative and practical abilities.
Information processing components underlying successful intelligence
The need to define problems and generate strategies to solve these problems exists in any culture.
Sternberg outlines the following components:
Metacomponents
Plan, monitor and evaluate the solution.
Performance components
Comparison of stimuli, justification if a response is adequate – and making the response.
Knowledge acquistion components
Learn how to solve problems, decide which information is relevant in the context of one’s learning
Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence is referred to as triarchic. It comprises three subtheories:
- A componental subtheory dealing with the components of intelligence
- An experimental subtheory dealing with the importance of coping with relatve novelty and of automation of information processing, and
- A contextual subtheory dealing with processes of adaption, shaping and selection.
According to Sternberg people who score high in conventional intelligence but low in successful intelligence are committing four fallacies in their thinking:
- stable-trait fallacy: belief that once smart, always smart, neglect life-long learning, lose their edge
- general ability fallacy: smart in one thing – smart in everthing; high levels of performance in school domains don’t mean they are explerts in any domain
- life-success fallacy: success in tests – rest is guaranteed. IQ alone does not guarantee success in life
- moral-equivalence fallacy: smart does not eqate good
Source: Sternberg, Robert, J. (2003).Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized. Cambridge University Press. US
I am looking forward to reading and studying the following pages on the application of successful intelligence theory to practical teaching as well as on creativity and the relations among intelligence, creativity and wisdom.
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