The Structure of Intellect (SOI) model was developed by J.P. Guilford as an assessment tool based on his Multiple Intelligence Theory. It measures 180 intellectual abilities using three dimensions: operations, contents, and products. This allows it to assess a wide range of learning abilities and identify giftedness or learning disabilities. While influential, the SOI model has been criticized for its statistical methods and lack of empirical support compared to models emphasizing general intelligence.

1. Structure of Intellect

2. Structure of Intellect
• Originated in Guilford’s Multiple Intelligence
Theory.
• It is used as an assessment tool for students.
• It can determined learning disabilities as well as
enrichment for gifted students.
• Basically, this learning theory focuses on one’s
ability to think and show it visually.

3. J.P Guilford
• Joy Paul Guilford was an American
psychologist.
•Born: March 7, 1897 in Nebraska
•Died: November 26, 1987 in
California
• Was a psychology professor in the
University of Nebraska.

4. J.P Guilford and U.S Army
• In 1941, he entered the U.S. Army as a
Lieutenant Colonel and served as Director of
Psychological Research Unit No. 3 at Santa Ana
Army Air Base. There he worked on the
selection and ranking of aircrew trainees as the
Army Air Force investigated why a sizable
proportion of trainees was not graduating.

5. J.P Guilford and U.S Army
• Promoted to Chief of the Psychological
Research Unit at the U.S. Army Air Forces
Training Command Headquarters in Fort Worth,
Guilford oversaw the "Stanines Project" which
identified eight specific intellectual abilities
crucial to flying a plane. (Stanines, now a
common term in educational psychology, was
coined during Guilford's project). Over the
course of World War II, Guilford's use of these
eight factors in the development of the two-day
Classification Test Battery was significant in
increasing graduation rates for aircrew trainees.

6. J.P Guilford and U.S Army
• After the war, Guilford continued to work on the
intelligence tests, focusing particularly on
divergent thinking and creativity. He designed
numerous tests that measured creative thinking.

7. Structure of Intellect
• Guilford designed this assessment (SOI) tool to
help the Air Force pilots who would succeed in
the field.

8. Structure of Intellect
• Guilford identified three fundamental
components of intelligence. These were:
– Contents (5 kinds)
– Products (6 kinds)
– Operations (5 kinds)

9. Structure of Intelligence
Guilford's original model was composed of 120
components because he had not separated Figural
Content into separate Auditory and Visual
contents, nor had he separated Memory into
Memory Recording and Memory Retention.
When he separated Figural into Auditory and Visual
contents, his model increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150
categories.
When Guilford separated the Memory functions, his
model finally increased to the final 180 factors

10. Structure of Intellect
Each ability stands for a particular operation in a
particular content area and results in a specific
product, such as Comprehension of Figural
Units or Evaluation of Semantic Implications.

11. Structure of Intellect

12. Structure of Intellect
Content
• Guilford meant that different people seemed to
pay more attention to and think more effectively
about different kinds of information, such as:
 Visual information directly from the
senses or from imaging.
 Auditory information directly from the
senses or from images.
 Symbolic items such as words and
symbols which generally convey some
meaning.

13. Content
 Semantic meanings often, but not always,
associated with words.
 Behavioral information about the mental states
and behavior of observed individuals. (Note:
This type of content was added to the model
based on abilities that emerged from his testing.)
Daniel Goleman (1995) has popularized this as
“social intelligence”.

14. Situations:
• An artist might excel at processing visual
information, but be poor at processing words,
numbers and other symbolic content.
• A researcher who excels at processing symbolic
content such as words and numbers and
semantic meaning, might be very poor at
processing behavioral data and thus relate
poorly with people.

15. Structure of Intellect
Products
• This dimension relates to the kinds of
information we process from the content types:
 Units refers 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.
 Classes refers to the ability to organize units
into meaningful groups or to sort units into the
right groups.

16. Products
Relations pertains to the ability to sense the
relationships between pairs of units.
 Systems consist of the relationships among
more than two units.
 Transformations is the ability to understand
changes in information, such as rotation of visual
figures, or jokes and puns in the semantic area.
 Implications refers to expectation. Given a
certain set of information, one might expect
certain other information to be true.

17. Structure of Intellect
With the two dimensions of content and product
we can sort out all the kinds of information
people can think about.
People can talk about the implications of a
symbolic series, the relationship of two sounds,
or behavioral transformations such as changes
in emotions.

18. Structure of Intellect
Operations
• This dimension describes what the brain does
with and to these types of information:
 Cognition has to do with the ability to
perceive the various items.
 Memory has to do with the ability to store
and retrieve various kinds of information.

19. Operations
 Divergent Production has to do with the ability to
access memory. It refers to the ability to find large
numbers of things which fit certain simple criteria.
 Convergent Production is the search of memory
for the single answer to a question or situation. This
area includes most areas of logic type problem
solving. It differs from divergence in the constraint of
one right answer. It seems likely that performance
on convergent tasks is actually the result of
divergent production and evaluation, but it is an
often tested for skill, and the one most often
associated with IQ.

20. Operations
 Evaluation is the ability to make judgments
about the various kinds of information,
judgments such as which items are identical in
some way, which items are better, and what
qualities are shared by various items.

21. Situations:
• The cognition of semantic units has to do with one's
ability to recognize words, i.e. one's vocabulary.
• Cognition of Behavioral Transformations would be
the ability to perceive changes in the expressions of
an individual.
• People differ in their abilities to remember not only
from other people, but also among various kinds of
information.
• Some people who are poor at remembering faces
(behavioral units) may be excellent at remembering
puns (semantic transformations).

22. Situations:
• For example, the ability to divergently produce
visual units includes the ability to list a great
many images which include a circle.
• Divergence in behavioral transformations would
include the ability to revise stories about people.
• Divergence in Symbolic Implications would
include the ability to list various equations which
can be deduced from given equations.

23. Criticism
Various researchers have criticized the statistical
techniques used by Guilford.
• According to Jensen (1998), Guilford's
contention that a g-factor was untenable was
influenced by his observation that cognitive tests
of U.S. Air Force personnel did not show
correlations significantly different from zero.
• According to one reanalysis, this resulted from
artifacts and methodological errors. Applying
more robust methodologies, the correlations in
Guilford's data sets are positive.

24. Criticism
• In another reanalysis, randomly generated
models were found to be as well supported as
Guilford's own theory.

25. Criticism
• Guilford's Structure-of-Intellect model of human
abilities has few supporters today. Carroll (1993)
summarized the view of later researchers:
"Guilford's SOI model must, therefore, be
marked down as a somewhat eccentric
aberration in the history of intelligence
models; that so much attention has been paid
to it is disturbing, to the extent that textbooks
and other treatments of it have given the
impression that the model is valid and widely
accepted, when clearly it is not."

26. Key Principles
1. Reasoning and problem-solving skills
2. Memory and Oppositions
3. Decision-making skills
4. Language-related skills
Based on a combination of the three components of
intelligences measures a wide range of abilities needed
for academic success.

27. Implications for Education
The Structure of Intellect’s philosophy is that
intelligence is not fixed.
Intelligence can be learnt.
IQ tests implements narrow abilities where the
SI measures a wide variety of abilities.
Need to consider all students are different.

28. “Psychology should be the chief basic science upon which the
practices of education depend. It should have supplied
education with the information it needs concerning the
processes of understanding, learning, and thinking, among
other things. One of the difficulties has been that such theory
as has been developed has been based primarily upon studies
of behavior of rats and pigeons. As someone has said, some
of the theory thus developed has been an insult even to the
rat.”
J.P. GUILFORD,
The Nature of Human Intelligence

29. Structure of Intellect

30. References:
• Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
• Guilford, J. (1950). Creativity. American Psychologist , 5, 444-454.
• Guilford, J. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
• Guilford, J. (1977). Way beyond the IQ. Buffalo, NY: Creative
Education Formation.
• http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/intellect.html
• http://www.lifecircles-inc.com/Learningtheories/guilford.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR-lAzk66YU
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsxqOIR9mzA&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN3e2GLP0Ns
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDgeTqHtUf0