Definition of Multiple Intelligences MI

24 use MI teaching as a means for college students to explore their intelligence strengths. On the basis of research in several disciplines, each of us has a number of relatively independent mental faculties, which is called as our MI. A belief in a single intelligence says that we have domain intelligences as the centre which determines how well we perform in every section of life. On the other hand, a belief in MI says that we actually have a number of relatively autonomous intelligences – linguistic information, spatial information, musical information, information about other people, and so on. All of human in this world have MI. In fact, we usually choose an area where a person has considerable power as a strong intelligence. For example, someone has an ability to win regularly at a game which involves spatial thinking, while the other one may be strong in spatial intelligence. If someone has ability to speak a foreign language fluently after just a few times or months and become a good speaker as good as native speaker, he may have strong linguistic intelligence Strauss, 2013. As it has been discussed above, MI can be applied in any part of school and family. It is one of the reasons why MI model becomes a successful model. Another reason why it is successful is that every student has an opportunity to choose, specialize and explore himherself in at least one area. But usually, student will choose three or four. In a qualitative study, Teele 1994 finds strong link between MI and the instructional process; receiving MI-based instruction enables students to become 25 more involved in classroom activities and have greater opportunities to develop their potential. Teele 1994 considered the MI theory to be “the key to providing quality instruction” p. 141. Based on this theory, teachers may seek out individual ways of helping learners in accordance with their dominant intelligences. After knowing the students’ dominant intelligences, the teachers may help them to find ways in exploring their ability based on their dominant intelligences. According to Campbell 1991, each student learns subject matter in many different ways in order to grab chances of successfully understanding and remembering any information. Through MI, many students’ needs are fulfilled. Their intellectual needs are constantly found by the challenge and frequently exercising in their creativity. On the other hand, at the same time, the students’ emotional needs are found through working together with others. Through the process, they can develop their strengths and even they understand themselves better as individuals. That is why this process goes deeper in the learning rather than teaching. Within this perspective, learning through engaging full spectrum of students intelligences has a purpose to emphasize understanding, employing multiple courses options to be learnt, and assessing through MI to inform performance of understanding and more instructions.

d. Criteria of Multiple Intelligences MI

Gardner 1983, 1993 established eight criteria for an intelligence to be identified, to determine whether or not a particular human capacity is qualified as intelligence. 26 Gardner’s criteria that considered are evidenced by: 1 The potential isolation of an intellectual competence by brain damage; 2 The presence of highly uneven profiles of abilities of idiot savants, prodigies, and autistic children; 3 The existence of one or more basic information processing mechanisms or core operations on various kinds of input, such as the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic capacities in language, or the rhythmic and pitch abilities in music; 4 The existence of a distinctive developmental history linked to an identifiable set of expert performances; 5 The plausibility of an evolutionary history; 6 The support from experimental tasks showing the difficulty of establishing transfers of learning across tasks; 7 The support from psychometric findings on the high correlation among tasks designed to assess one type of ability; and 8 The susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system such as language, mathematics, and picturing Chan, 2000. Based on these criteria above, firstly, Gardner 1983 initially identified seven intelligences that all individuals possess to varying degrees. These all intelligences can be combined and used in highly personal ways. In his 1999 book, entitled Intelligence Reframed, Gardner considered additional candidate