Creativity and Intelligence in Applied Educational Psychology - Reflection 7

Module 7 – Teaching and the components of intelligence

1. Perkins Survey (1995): Feuerstein’s IE; deBono’s CoRT; Lipman’s Philos.4kids & Project Intel’
2. Palincsar; and Stone and Reid – improving thinking skills for LD students
3. Expertise – Perkins, Mackintosh; Domain-specific's and General Intelligence's role in expertise
4. Training to develop Cognitive Complexity
5. Brief Survey of findings regarding intelligence research

This was my favorite module for several reasons. First, I am starting to feel acquainted with the major theories of intelligence and more experienced with how they overlap and how they contrast. I read the Ritchie book on vacation last August and was totally unfamiliar with the concepts and references, but it was not until this Module’s reading that encountering the names of education enrichment programs and Luria in Chapter 5, as well the Bell Curve in Chapter 6 had meaning greater than the scope of the passage. Two weeks ago in a discussion that was focused on a single intelligence model in Anthropology class, I compared Sternberg’s triarchic approach to intelligence and the factor analytic approaches. Even though that extra context digressed the discussion further than needed for an evolutionary evaluation of differences between the Homo species and Hominins, it felt good to be comfortable with the material.

​The introduction to Instrumental Enrichment (IE) will be useful when creating lesson and assessment plans as an English teacher. Vygotsky’s approach is already my preference, but the four features of IE are excellent complements for teaching programs designed to promote self-efficacy and positive feedback loops with my students. The zone of proximal development is expanded by IE’s more challenge-focused requirements, to strengthen areas of weakness through information input, elaboration, and engaging assumptions in output through positive self-reflection, as well as through finding a starting point that requires the least prior knowledge. I imagine that scaffolding could be perceived as coddling, or not providing sufficient challenge to students, and these features of IE provide an effective counterpoint. This approach was deepened by the information presented about Cognitive Instruction and Intentional Learning, notably prolepsis and reflective abstraction. One of the test questions for this module reinforced the importance of purposeful goals that are transparent to the student. This is also an important feature of managing at scale, for example, when my direct reports were hundreds or even many thousands of miles away in another country. Actionability of a goal can be directly observed as it is created when all parties engage in a reasonable discussion of the intent of the goal.

When this module turned to a review of expertise, it provided a chance for me to return to ideas I had considered during the study of creativity, notably how eminence was most often the most objective factor used to identify judges of levels of creativity. In this module, expertise is the synthesis of reflective and experiential intelligence much like fluid and crystallized intelligence creates a measure of general intelligence. As a manager of departments about which I knew only the basics and for which I had had no formal training, I can attest that domain-specific knowledge is a strong predictor of professional competence, something sought when investing long hours trying to find the right candidate for a job. Fluid intelligence and the ability of someone to reflect on their domain knowledge so that it can be more easily applied to new scenarios is also a major factor because real-world problems always have plenty of ambiguity.

Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed the statistics and factoids presented in the summary at the end of the lecture notes. Except for the seventh point, they were meaningful reminders and additional context about prior lessons. The correlation data was most meaningful to me because it provides sound basis for the belief that intelligence is most strongly influenced by genetic factors. The data in the sixth point succinctly states the case in favor of genetics.