Title: Howard Gardner | Biography, Theory, Multiple Intelligences, Psychology, & Facts | Britannica
Headings: Howard Gardner
Howard Gardner
American psychologist
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Content: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (1999), and Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons (2006), Gardner’s theory inspired teachers, school leaders, and special educators to embrace the notion that there are many ways to be intelligent. Gardner was the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. He was a studious child who loved to read, and he developed into a gifted pianist. He retained a lifelong passion for music that contributed to his nonunitary conception of human cognitive capacity. Gardner undertook most of his formal training and graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in social relations in 1965 and a doctoral degree in developmental psychology in 1971. His many academic appointments included a professorship of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine (1984–2005) and a professorship of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1986–98), where he was appointed the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education in 1998. In Frames of Mind, Gardner faulted earlier, unitary models of intellectual ability, in which intelligence was typically reported as a single IQ (intelligence quotient) score. He detailed instead a more complex paradigm in which human intelligence comprises eight or more relatively autonomous intellectual capacities: logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself), and naturalist intelligence (the ability to recognize and make use of certain aspects of the environment).