Information about intelligence

1. Intelligence

2. What Is Intelligence?
-Some experts describe intelligence as the ability to solve problems.
-Others describe it as the capacity to adapt and learn from experience.
-Intelligence includes characteristics like creativity and interpersonal
skills.
-Intelligence cannot be directly measured.
-We can only evaluate intelligence indirectly by studying and comparing
the intelligent acts that people perform.

3. Intelligence Theories
-Sternberg’s Theory: There are 3 types of intelligence:
● Analytical: The ability to analyze, judge, evaluate, compare and contrast
● Creative: Consists of the ability to create, design, invent, originate, and imagine
● Practical: Involves the ability to use, apply, implement, and put ideas into practice
-Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences: People have multiple intelligences and IQ tests
only measure a few of them.
● 8 types of intelligence: verbal, mathematical, spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, musical, and
Interpersonal.
-Emotional Intelligence: The ability to perceive and express emotion accurately and
adaptively, to understand emotion and emotional knowledge.

4. Giftedness
-People who are gifted have high intelligence or superior talent of some kind.
-Characteristics of Children Who Are Gifted
● Precocity: Gifted children precocious. They develop certain abilities earlier.
● Marching to their own drum: Gifted children in a different way, they need minimal help
from adults.They make discoveries and find solutions on their own.
● A passion to master: Gifted children display an intense, obsessive interest and ability to
focus. They do not need to be pushed, they motivate themselves.
-Experts argue that the education of gifted children in the US requires a significant overhaul.
Underchallenged children can become disruptive and lose interest in succeeding.

5. Creativity
-Creativity is the ability to think about something in novel and unusual ways and come up with unique and
good solutions to problems.
-Steps in the Creative Process
1. Preparation: Immerse in the problem or issue
2. Incubation: Churn ideas around in your head
3. Insight: Moment when all pieces of the puzzle seem to fit together
4. Evaluation: Moment when you decide whether the idea is valuable and worth pursuing
5. Elaboration: The work. Perspiration

6. Characteristics of Creative
Thinkers
● -Flexibility and playful thinking
● -Inner motivation
● -Willingness to risk
● -Objective evaluation of work-
Strategies for increasing children’s creative thinking:
● Encourage brainstorming
● Provide environments that stimulate creativity
● Don’t over control students
● Encourage internal motivation
● Build children’s confidence
● Guide children to be persistent and delay gratification
● Encourage children to take intellectual risks
● Introduce children to creative people

7. Intellectual Disability
-Intellectual Disability is a condition of limited mental ability in which the individual
has a low IQ, has difficulty adapting to the demands of everyday life and exhibits
these characteristics by age 18.
-Organic intellectual disability describes a genetic disorder or a lower level of
intellectual functioning caused by brain damage.
-When no evidence of organic brain damage can be found, cases are labeled:
cultural-familial intellectual disability.

8. Sources
Santrock, J.W. (2016). A topical approach to life-span development (8th
ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.