Cynthia A. Wooding
The curriculum is designed with the guidance of Sternberg's Triachic Theory. In Sternberg's book, Teaching for Successful Intelligence, he believes in teaching successful intelligence that will be used in everyday life. Usually educational programs develop only in one particular area - analytical intelligence. He has noted successful people use three abilities to achieve success. These three abilities are analytical, practical, and creative. These abilities are vital to living successfully in everyday life. society, students are academically labeled in regards to analytical intelligence testing, but yet living successfully is based on having a balance between having practical, creative, and analytical. If testing is based only on analytical and not the other two abilities, ones self imagine might be lowered. Applying all three intelligences gives the student a balance for success. This will enable the students to set expectations or a set of standards for him or herself, thus continuing the learning process for a successful life. This is when positive behavior of self-image takes place in an individual. I chose Sternberg for the design of this unit to help students explore all of their abilities for everyday and academic success.
Sternberg describes his theory with three intelligences. The three intelligences are creative, analytical, and practical. Analytical intelligence is the internal world of the individual, or the mental mechanisms that underlie intelligent behavior. The second is creative intelligence, which is intelligence and experience, or mediating role of one's passages through life between the internal and external worlds of the individual. And the third, practical intelligence is intelligence and the external world of the individual, or the use of these mental mechanisms in everyday life in order to attain an intelligent fit to the environment.
Sternberg's (1985) theory of intelligence contains three sub theories, one about context, one about experience, and one about the cognitive components of information processing. Sternberg believes that the environment of the individual has to be considered and what the society thinks is intelligent according to their culture. It is then determined whether that person wants to adapt to their present environment, selecting a different environment, or reshape one's current environment. The intelligence is determined when a person is exposed to tasks that are given to them that are unfamiliar or relatively new. His theory also looks at the relationship and cognitive process of how the person controls and monitors the new tasks which are referred to as metacomponents. How the person executes the new tasks that are given are referred to as performance components, and how the person encodes and assembles new knowledge of the current new tasks that the person was given are referred to as knowledge acquisition components. As a whole, the Triachic theory claims different aspects or kinds of intelligence (e.g., academic, practical, and creative). In an article called Current Research on Intelligence, Frank Yekovich gives an excellent example of Kearin's 1981 study of different intelligences in different cultural settings. Kearin found that aboriginal children develop more of their visuospatial memories than Anglo-Australian children, who are more likely to apply verbal strategies to spatial memory tasks than the aborigines, who employ spatial strategies. It is these various kinds of adaptations that Sternberg test in his Triachic Theory of Human Intelligence.
